This poem nailed me to the wall when I first read it in high school English class. It demurely appeared in the anthology, disguised as a regular boring poem. It wasn't.

When I reread it now, all these years since I was seventeen, I can still reenact the physical shock, like vertigo or a sudden headache.

Real poems are scary that way.

Spring and Fall

Gerard Manley Hopkins

          --to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.