Hopkins wrote it to a child, and it is one of the saddest things in English, and it is a Wetherspoon
The Goldengrove holds a 4.0 from four thousand nine hundred and thirty-four people, is listed at one to ten pounds, and the name comes from a poem about death.
Spring and Fall
By Gerard Manley Hopkins.
And it is addressed to a young child, who is crying because the leaves are falling from the trees.
And the poem asks her whether she is grieving over Goldengrove unleaving.
And then it tells her why
Which is the turn, and it is one of the most devastating things in English poetry.
Because the poem says: you will get older, and you will stop caring about leaves.
And then, in the last lines, it tells her what she is actually crying about, and what she does not know she is crying about.
It is the blight man was born for.
It is herself she mourns for.
A child is weeping at the death of a wood, and the poet tells her – gently, and without cruelty – that she is weeping because she is going to die, and that she knows it in a way she cannot yet say.
Which is on a pub in Stratford
And the Prat’s editorial desk would like to be entirely clear that it thinks this is magnificent.
Because there is a widespread convention that this chain is a subject for sneering.
And it has named a pub in one of the poorer districts of London after a Victorian Jesuit priest’s poem about mortality, and it has done so quietly, and it does not explain it, and essentially nobody drinking there knows.
And the cheap room wins
Eight postcodes and twelve hundred and eighty-eight articles.
The cheap venues out-rate the expensive ones in every single district, without one exception.
Because the star rating measures the gap between what somebody expected when they pushed the door and what they got – and a venue charging under ten pounds is promising almost nothing, and then it is fine, and the gap is inverted.
A 4.0 on five thousand people is a real number.
And it is infrastructure
Because a room where somebody on an ordinary wage can sit down, warm, for two hours, without doing arithmetic first, is not a joke.
It opens early. It does food all day. It has no music, so you can hear each other.
Which is three items off the only specification that has ever mattered.
Verdict
And Hopkins published nothing
Which is the fact that finishes it.
Because he was a Jesuit priest, and he thought poetry was a vanity that pulled him away from God – and he burned a great deal of his early work.
And essentially nothing was published in his lifetime.
He died at forty-four, of typhoid, in Dublin, largely unknown – and his poems survived only because a friend kept them in a drawer.
They were published thirty years after he died.
And he is now regarded as one of the most original poets in the language, and he invented a whole prosody, and nobody read a word of it while he was alive.
Nobody in the room ever knows.
Verdict
Cheap, honest, and better named than any bar in Mayfair.
Megan Amram is a standup comedian based in Portland, OR. She is a native of North London.
The thing about London satire is it has to be better than reality or nobody pays attention. This proves reality’s indefensible.
Alguien va a enmarcar esto en su oficina como un grito de auxilio.