In Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Spring and Fall," the elegiac tone, created through mournful diction and nature imagery, mirrors the poem's theme of the fleeting nature of youth.
The diction of the poem is exceedingly mournful. The words "colder," "wanwood," "weep," "will," "sorrow," "ghost," "blight," and "mourns" are the most evident. "Colder" implies a hostile environment, while "wanwood" describes something pale or dim, as if flickering out. "Mourn," "weep," and "sorrow," are all words directly related to mourning. The verb "will" is an inevitability-sometime in the future, this decay must occur. A "ghost" is a soul fleeting into death, ethereal and mournful. Finally, a "blight" is a plague or infestation or other terrible event capable of great destruction. All of these words combine to create the tone of a death song, a slow elegy.
The nature imagery of "Spring and Fall" begins with the title. "Spring and Fall" is a symbol; two real seasons, the former a time of new life, the latter a time of decay. Here they are symbolic of the times of a life. The metonymy of the leaves that Margaret cares for stands for all the things that decay in the fall. The speaker tells the child Margaret that there will come a time when "Though words of wanwood leafmeal lie"--though the whole world is falling into death-she will cry only for her own death and decay. She will come to realize that she is just like the trees in the fall, her leaves--her youth--falling away under the ravages of time. The final image of the poem, the metaphor "{Death} is the blight man was born for" emphasizes that all of life leads towards the terrible inevitability of death. Each of the above images contributes to the speaker's elegiac tone. The speaker sounds as if he is speaking to the dying, lamenting their lost youth--as indeed he is, speaking to Margaret, only a child but already on a terminal approach to death.
"Spring and Fall" is a poem about the fleeting nature of youth. Mr. Hopkins believes that even in the new creation of spring, death and decay are always approaching. They are the hunters and all mortal things are the prey. Inevitably, creation will become destruction, and although we may mourn the death of leaves in our youth, soon we will be eulogizing ourselves.