In the spring of 1880 Gerard Manley Hopkins was working as a Catholic priest in a slum district of Liverpool, a district which, at that time, was a very unpleasant place with an appallingly high disease and death rate.
This was in the days before the car, a time when dray horses — “work” horses — hauled goods in wooden wagons with iron-rimmed wheels. Work horses are strikingly unlike ordinary horses; they are high and massive, standing some six feet high at the shoulder — and very strong.
Today’s poem is an odd combination; on the one hand it is quite businesslike, dealing matter-of-factly with the rites and services a Catholic priest was expected, as his duty, to provide to the seriously ill, but behind that it seems to be a tender and rather loving meditation on the death of one particular man.
That man was Felix Spencer, a sturdily-built young farrier. A farrier was one who could do the blacksmith’s work of making horseshoes, fitting and nailing them to the horse’s hooves, as well as undertaking the skilled trimming and tending of the hooves. It was a very “masculine” profession in feeling and required a good deal of strength as well as practical anatomical knowledge of horses.
Felix Spencer, in spite of his imposing physical build, came down with tuberculosis, which in those days and the damp British climate often proved fatal — at the young age of 31 he died. In this poem Hopkins changes the surname Spencer to “Randal.”
Let’s look at the poem part by part:
FELIX RANDAL
Felix Randal the farrier, O he is 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?
Hopkins ponders the death of Felix Randal, and he puts it in the form of two questions:
1. “O is he dead then?”
2. “Is my duty as priest to him ended…?” But he does not stop there; he recalls “his mould (“kind,” “form”) of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome,” he sees in memory the sturdy body of Felix, handsome in a hardy, well-built and imposing way. But he sees also the changes wrought by illness — that sturdy body “pining, pining,” meaning declining and weakening. And finally he sees the time when about four ultimately fatal physical disorders (what we call today “complications”) manifested in his body (“fleshed there”). These disorders all struggled with one another and ultimately killed the poor man, so ill near the end that his mind had become confused (“reason rambled in it”). Though it may seem peculiar to us, Hopkins puts the question mark not after “my duty all ended,” but all the way at the end of the long description of the body and its fading.
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!
The illness, as we can easily imagine, was just too much for the young man as his body broke down. He lost his calm and cursed and swore, but became more resigned to death (“but mended”) after “being anointed and all,” that is, after having received the Catholic rite of extreme unction during which a person in danger of death was marked with blessed oil on his forehead. Hopkins believed Felix had actually begun to become more spiritual (“a heavenly heart began”) some months earlier when Hopkins had given him (“tendered to him”) the Eucharist, the bread Catholics believe to be changed into the body of Jesus, which Hopkins calls “our sweet reprieve and ransom.”
Hopkins finishes the verse with an exclamation:
“Ah, well, God rest him all road ever he offended!” Hopkins is using “rest” here with a double meaning. First he means “God keep him,” using “rest” with the meaning it has in the old Christmas carol “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”; second he means “God give him rest,” as is sung in the mass for the dead:
Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine…
“Rest eternal give them, Lord…”
And Hopkins’ wish is that God may keep Felix and give him rest “all road ever he offended.” Here Hopkins uses a regional northern English usage, ” all road,” meaning “all ways.” So the meaning is, “May God give him peace and rest no matter all the ways in which he may have offended in life.”
Hopkins continues his pondering:
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;
Hopkins remarks on his visits to Felix in a general way, saying “This seeing the sick endears them to us” — we develop an affection for the ill when we visit them and see their suffering, yet it also “endears” us — not only endearing us to the ill, but we tend to become better, more compassionate ourselves. Hopkins had comforted Felix with soothing words (“My tongue had taught thee comfort”), had laid his hand upon him fondly (touch had quenched thy tears,” and the tears Felix shed also touched Hopkins deeply, as we see in the lamenting, simple words, “child, Felix, poor Felix Randal.” Hopkins had developed a real affection for the man, and I suspect that he is underplaying it here because he does not want to admit its depth to himself or to others — remember that Hopkins was homosexual. He seems to have been struck by how different a man Felix was in form and function from the quiet, physically undeveloped and bookish nature of Hopkins himself.
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!
Hopkins ponders how far Felix was, in the weak and broken condition of his last days, from the boisterous years of his previous life when he stood working at the “random grim forge.” “Random” here is used in its old meaning of “with great force or violence,” and “grim” in its old sense of “fierce.” Hopkins deliberately blurs the application of the adjectives so that they apply not only to the fiery forge but also to the hammering of the horseshoe on the anvil and to Felix himself. Hopkins sees Felix standing, powerful and grim, before the fierce fire of the forge, violently beating the white-hot metal of the horseshoes with great force behind the blows of the hammer.
There he stood in those happier, earlier days, “powerful amidst peers,” that is, he stood strong amid the strength of fire and iron and massive horses, as well as being strong among other sturdy men of his kind. He could have had no forethought in those days of strength of his future illness and final fatal weakness. So blissfully unaware of what lay in store for him, he fettled ( using “fettle in its sense of “to make ready”) a horseshoe for the great, gray drayhorse (a horse that pulls a dray, a large wagon for transporting goods). Hopkins calls the horseshoe “his (the horse’s) bright and battering sandle,” because horseshoes not only become bright when they are forged white-hot, but also become bright when polished by wear. The horseshoe is “battering” not only because the farrier batters it with a hammer when making it, but also because the iron shoe batters against the cobblestones of the streets as the horse pulls the wagon.
I suspect that Hopkins is merely using “sandle” here because it is a word he likes (he uses it elsewhere), and because it makes a pleasant contrast when combined with the word “battering”; but some think he is also referring to a particular type of 19th century horseshoe that was once literally called a “sandal.”
Well, that is the poem. I do not think it is one of his best, and that, I suspect, is because Hopkins held back a bit, being of two minds, either consciously or unconsciously, about revealing to himself and to others too much about his feelings concerning the once “hardy-handsome” Felix Spencer — “Felix Randal” in the poem. But of course we must be careful not to read too much into this.
As he often does, Hopkins makes things more difficult than need be by his liking for old meanings of words and unusual expressions, but without that he would not be Hopkins, would he?
David
HOKKU 
Another interesting post although Hopkins can be very heavy going particularly for modern readers. Your explanation of the poem helps greatly.
I think there is a central, critical point here that you have missed, which is that Hopkins, the priest, is engaged in fitting the farrier with the sandals he will wear in heaven. He has the powerful last line, with the syllables pounding pow, pow, pow, like a sledgehammer beating on metal: didst FETtle for the GREAT GREY DRAYhorse his BRIGHT and BATTERING…and then he pulls you up short with the word “sandal,” with its Biblical associations and its sense of being thin and flexible, and only in that last word do your realize that he is comparing his job to the farrier’s.If you reread it in that light, maybe you will come to think, as I do, that it’s as fine a poem as anything Hopkins ever wrote.
RESPONSE:
Peter, I find nothing in the last stanza or anywhere in the poem to indicate Hopkins is “comparing his job to the farrier’s.” Instead, he is, in the last stanza, looking back from the weak last days and end of Felix to his former vital strength, when he stood at the forge and “fettled” (shaped, made ready) the shoes for the “great grey drayhorse.” There is nothing there, nor even the slightest hint, of Felix wearing sandals in heaven, or of Hopkins preparing them. By “sandal” Hopkins means simply “horseshoe,” and there is nothing biblical in that. We must beware of reading into Hopkins notions that are neither stated nor implied.
David
We are going to have to agree to disagree, David. The priest’s work is ended. He has successfully tendered reprieve and ransom to Felix, who as a result is now walking the roads of Paradise. He isn’t so heavy-handed as to make the comparison to the farrier’s job explicit, but that’s what the poem is all about. Your focus on his attraction to the farrier may have obscured the fact that he is writing about what it means to be a priest, securing eternal life for those he ministers to.
I was drawn here because Felix Randal is published in my 2017 Faber Poetry Diary. Thanks very much to David, for writing an illuminating and helpful commentary on the poem. I was intrigued by Peter’s response, and the meaning he took from the final word ‘sandal’. Even though I wasn’t immediately convinced by the suggestion of a biblical reference, I was still slightly surprised at David’s dismissal of what seemed to be a valid idea (especially as David had devoted a small paragraph to the word in his own piece).
I don’t know much about Hopkins, and I am not any sort of a critic, but I’m now erring on the side of Peter’s interpretation. I’m willing to give the poet credit for choosing the word deliberately, in a way that arguably provides a deeper and more spiritual connection between the poet and his subject. It certainly deepens the impact of the poem on me. Then I wondered what other word Hopkins might haven chosen, such as ‘sole’. Just a thought!
Thanks again to David and Peter for helping me to enjoy a poem that, on first reading, I wasn’t much taken with at all.
——
REPLY:
I can only repeat that I find no support whatsoever in the poem for the notion that Hopkins uses “bright and battering sandal” as metaphor or simile for Hopkins as priest fitting Felix with “heavenly sandals.” It strikes me as excessively fanciful.
David
David, thanks for your commentary on Felix Randal. I have to say that I think Peter is on to something though. The great joy of Hopkins’ poems is that they reveal layers of meaning like mini-Epiphanies and require reading many times in order to have these insights, and the question is whether the insights mean something to the reader – not whether they were necessarily meant by the poet. Hopkins use of made-up words and alliteration are designed to take the reader on a journey that can mean something to the reader. The marches in Mahler’s Sixth to conductor Klaus Tennstedt meant the coming of the Nazi goosestep. Mahler could never have intended that, since he died in 1909. Is Tennstedt’s insight invalid? I had read the last stanza and the choice of “sandal” as being clearly an allusion to the Gospel where John the Baptist states that someone (Jesus) will come after him – someone so great that he, John is not fit to buckle his sandal. Felix is fitting the horses with sandals……………i.e. he is doing the Lord’s work.
REPLY:
While one is quite free to read one’s personal meanings and symbolism into any poem, or to read historical prescience into symphonic compositions, we must distinguish those from the intent of the author or composer. What I deal with here is the intent of the poet, to the extent that we can discern it from the words and known background of a poem. And again, there is nothing in the this poem to indicate that Hopkins intended “sandals” as an allusion to John the Baptist claiming unworthiness to unloose the straps on the sandals of “the one coming after,” i.e. Jesus. One is certainly free to read such allusions into a poem, but they must be carefully distinguished from the intent of the poet, and whether they are actually in the poem. And in this poem it is not Felix who is “doing the Lord’s work,” but rather Hopkins himself as priest, in ministering to Felix.
David