Favourite poems 2 - Felix Randall by Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

During the first few months of lockdown, it was like a stolen season. All was quiet, the traffic stopped and our roads and skies were silent except for bird song.

I'm those glorious spring months, the main exercise that Cro and I had together was going for a 3-mile walk around Martlesham Creek early each morning. And we decided that to add to the feathered glory, we would learn some favourite poems by heart, and this is one of them, by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Poetry Magazine

July/August 2024Subscribe

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Felix Randal

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,

Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome

Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some

Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended

Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some

Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom

Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!

This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.

My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,

Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,

When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,

Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

And through those weeks, as we made the poem our own and really understood the sound and the reason in it, you felt it become less like something you perform and more like talking with your own voice, a beautiful kind of ventriloquism. And because you knew what was coming in the next stanza, you emotionally aligned with the narrator, who we assume to be a young curate, and Manley Hopkins himself. 

The most affecting line is in the third verse where he says

Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;

...because in the 'child' you hear all different echoes of the blacksmiths life. He was a child indeed once, and is now weak as a child. To the believer Manley Hopkins the old smith is a child of god and also 'child' to his young father, the curate.

But the word 'child' also contains simple love and human sympathy for a great spirit now overthrown. Cro could hardly say that word, so I usually took my turn at that line.

And of course now, four years and one death and one diagnosis later，it takes on new meanings in my memory. Sickness never really broke Cro and she was balanced and respectful as her life moved to its end, whether you believe 'Death' was something approaching or not. She lived each day with feeling and glory and an intense respect for what it means to be alive. I intend to copy her and will now, because we learned it together, say this poem in my heart one more time.