There is something about the passing of a season or the end of an enjoyable event that provokes the emotions. The young seem particularly affected by such emotion. Two cases in point are the grief felt by Margaret in Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring and Fall" and the school children's anger in Robin Becker's "The Star Show." These children are alike in at least three important ways: they experience a deep emotion without understanding its source, while the adult speakers in the poems make the connections between the passing of minor events and the end of life.
             First, both Margaret and the school children experience deep emotion although their responses to the passing of time are different. The adult speaker in "Spring and Fall" begins by asking: "Margaret are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?" (Hopkins lines 1-2). Margaret is evidently a girl who appreciates the beauty of a grove of trees crowned in golden leaves, which are now turning brown and falling. She reacts to this normal progression of the seasons with sighs and grief. On the other hand, the school children in "The Star Show" are at a planetarium watching the stars as they would have been at times varying from winter with the Hopi Indians (Becker 41-49) through spring and summer in a beautiful meadow. Becker describes the children as willing to leave their known world to enter the heavens (21-23) and feeling sad that Galileo experienced repression (31-35). The speaker, perhaps the poet at a younger age, states: "I sat
             weeping for what I'd lost" (Becker 51) when the commentator moves on to other skies. This sorrow is compounded as the commentator speeds up the show and ends it. "I sat bereft before the retreating stars," Becker writes (68). That sadness turns to anger as the children leave with "ordinary jeers/ and curses fill[ing] our mouths" (B
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