Felix Randal

Gerard Manley Hopkins · Leaving Cert Poetry

Felix Randal is a sonnet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1880, while working as a Catholic parish priest in industrial Liverpool. It is spoken by a priest who has just heard that a parishioner is dead, and the brilliant thing is where it finishes: not at the deathbed, but at a forge, with the dead man alive and hammering.

Felix Randal Gerard Manley Hopkins: a priest grieving the man he nursed

Hopkins was a Jesuit priest before he was anything else, and this poem comes out of that job. The poem was built on a real parishioner, a blacksmith Hopkins ministered to on his deathbed. The speaker is not a poet watching a funeral from a distance. He is the man who sat in the sickroom for months. It is a sonnet in sprung rhythm, printed in four stanzas of four, four, three and three lines.

Reading the sonnet, section by section

Octave, first quatrain · Lines 1 to 4

The poem opens mid conversation. Somebody has brought the news, and line 1 is the priest’s reaction, a shocked question with his full name and trade attached. Lines 2 to 4 look back: Felix as he was, big-boned and hardy-handsome, and the ruin of him. The doubled pining in line 3 makes the wasting sound as repetitive as it was, reason rambled personifies a mind wandering off, and the alliterative fatal four disorders of line 4 close on four illnesses fighting in one body.

• “Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,”A rhetorical question in a voice that has not composed itself yet, and his duty and his grief end in the same breath. Your opening quote for the poem as elegy or as pastoral care.
• Lines 3 to 4 show how Hopkins handles terminal illness. Repetition and heavy alliteration drag the rhythm out until the decline feels long rather than tragic.

Octave, second quatrain · Lines 5 to 8

Line 5 does something braver than most elegies manage: it admits the dying man cursed. The mending in that line is not physical. It follows the anointing, and the heavenlier heart began months earlier, once the priest had brought him what he calls our sweet reprieve and ransom, meaning confession and the last communion. The stanza closes on a prayer in the priest’s own dialect.

• “Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended”Use this against any answer that turns Felix into a passive saint. The honesty is what makes his spiritual change believable.
• “Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!”All road ever he offended means however he may have sinned. The octave ends on forgiveness rather than judgement, in speech you can hear.

Sestet, first tercet · Lines 9 to 11

Line 9 is the sentence the poem exists to say, and its word order is the argument: seeing the sick makes them dear to us, and makes us dear too. Line 10 stops that turning abstract by naming what the priest did, tongue teaching comfort, touch drying tears. Watch the pronouns too. Felix is he and him in the octave; from line 10 he is thee and thy, and Hopkins is talking to him rather than about him.

• “This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.”The mirrored word order is a chiasmus: it enacts the reciprocity it describes. The one quote to build a pastoral care answer on.
• “Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;”Calling a grown blacksmith child flips the power in the relationship into a parent’s tenderness, and repeating the name sounds like grief said aloud.

Sestet, second tercet · Lines 12 to 14

Line 12 sets up the turn: none of this was thinkable back then, in Felix’s more boisterous years. The poem then walks backwards out of the sickroom. Line 13 puts him at the forge and refuses to prettify it, random and grim, with Felix powerful amidst peers. Fettle means to make or prepare and the sandal is a horseshoe, so the last thing you see is a man shoeing a huge cart horse, and the last mark on the page is an exclamation mark.

• The forge detail in line 13 does quiet social work. It restores Felix to a place where he had standing, which the sickbed had taken from him.
• “Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!”The heaviest alliteration in the poem lands here, so the sonnet finishes with the ring of the forge in your ear. Your closing quote on dignity in ordinary work.

The ideas the poem keeps returning to

• Care that runs both ways. Line 9 says it outright: tending the sick creates affection in the carer as well as gratitude in the cared-for. It is a bond, not charity handed down, and the priest has lost something too.
• The body breaking down. The first quatrain sets a strong man against a long illness that takes his mind before his life. You get the decline first and the strength last, which is the harder order.
• Grace and forgiveness. The change in Felix comes through named sacramental acts in lines 6 to 8, not vague comfort.
• Skilled work as worth. The closing tercet argues that what made Felix somebody was his competence at the anvil.

Sound, and the hammer in the last line

The sound of the poem matches the state of the man. The opening quatrain slows everything down, repetition on pining and the drag of alliteration across fatal four disorders. The second quatrain starts with a hard, monosyllabic sentence and softens as the anointing takes effect. The sestet is quieter, built on soft consonants in tongue, touch and tears, until the last line detonates. Name the compound epithets too, which pack a description into one hyphenated word.

Who is speaking, and how the tone turns at the close

The speaker is a priest, and everything he says comes from that role, which is why the poem never sounds like general mourning. Two shifts give it its shape. The address moves from he in the octave to thee in the sestet, so the priest turns from reporting a death to speaking to the dead man. Then the tense moves: lines 12 to 14 leave the sickroom for years earlier, so the sonnet ends further from the present than it began, in strength and noise.

Taking Felix Randal into the exam

This is your Hopkins poem for compassion and human relationships. Two theses work well. One: ministering to the dying is a mutual bond rather than one-directional charity, with line 9 as your spine. Two: the closing image at the forge moves you more than any account of his dying could, because it makes the loss concrete. Comparing across Hopkins, set it beside Spring, where something precious also cannot be kept unclouded, or The Windhover.

Where marks are lost

Questions to test yourself

• At what point does Hopkins stop talking about Felix and start talking to him?
• Why does the word order in line 9 matter more than any single word in it?
• What does the word child in line 11 do to the relationship between the two men?
• Does ending on Felix at work make his death feel more tragic, or less?

Quick Links