Summary
“Felix Randal” is believed to be based on a true story. Hopkins, like the speaker in the poem, was a parish priest. In the spring of 1880, Hopkins learned that one of his parishioners—a relatively young man named Felix Spencer—had finally succumbed to the ravages of tuberculosis. The similarities of the name and circumstance indicates that the parish priest is to be taken as a barely fictionalized version of Hopkins.
This poem uses the sonnet form, which is one of the more rigidly structured types of poems. A sonnet's structure usually sets up a situation or a problem in the first half of the poem and works toward an answer in the second. This change is marked by the volta, or the "turn" that occurs between the first eight lines and the final six. The horrific death by tuberculosis—suffering from which, the body literally wastes away—has the power to transform a man powerful enough to work as a farrier into a skeletal shadow of his former self. The poem’s second line indicates this is the tragic trajectory of Felix when the speaker gets quite specific about having “watched this mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome” succumb to the long, draining process of death by consumption. The poem transforms in both tone and subject matter, moving from sorrowful yet stony to passionate and wistful.
Traditional sonnets also often revolve around love, both romantic/personal and divine. This poem ventures into both territories, though it stays mostly grounded in terrestrial love, the care between the speaker and Felix Randal.
After the first two lines, the speaker bluntly asserts that illness “broke” Felix over the course of several months. However, with the speaker's spiritual guidance, Felix was able to develop a "heavenlier heart." The speaker, recognizing that all of Felix now belongs to the past, prays for God to forgive Felix of his sins in the afterlife.
The poem here moves from quatrains, or four-lined stanzas, to tercets, three-lined stanzas; this break in the poem is the volta. The tone becomes more philosophical at first; the speaker reflects on how illness creates a symbiotic connection between the ill and those who tend to them. The following lines move from the speaker's words and touch that brought Felix comfort and "quenched [his] tears," which are the reason the speaker is able to preach so convincingly, as Felix has touched his heart with his pain. The speaker's own pain then becomes more palpable than it has been thus far in the poem; he says, "child, Felix, poor Felix Randal" almost pleadingly.
In the final tercet the speaker strays into memory, though it is unclear if they are the priest's own memories or memories he is projecting onto Felix. He thinks of Felix in his prime, when he was "far from then forethought of" his illness and death. In this scene, Felix is noticeable for his strength amidst his peers and fashions a horseshoe for a grey drayhorse.
Analysis
The poem begins as if the speaker is in conversation, receiving the news of the death. However, before the end of the first line, the words turn inward; the speaker reflects that his duties have "all ended," and then goes on to describe how he watched Felix succumb to illness. From the way the speaker describes Felix before his illness, the reader can gather that Felix was one of his congregants before his illness. The speaker describes Felix as "big-boned and hardy-handsome;" the compound adjectives echo each other rhythmically, each with two stressed syllables. This is the first example of the battering rhythm, mimicking the sound of the farrier's tools, that appears in this poem. This also is an example of Hopkins' use of sprung rhythm, which is unlike other rhythmic structures because it pays attention to the number of stressed syllables in a line and allows for an indeterminate number of unstressed syllables; Hopkins felt that this method better imitated human speech. The effect is one of increased dynamism compared to that of stricter structures.
The speaker continues to describe Felix in his last months, saying the man was "Pining, pining;" the repetition echoes the mournfulness of the sentiment. The speaker then says "till time when reason rambled in it;" clearly he was present for much of the man's illness. Here alliteration and consonance are used to create a sentence that feels like it has hard corners due to its strong consonants.
The speaker goes on to say, "and some/Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?" The fatal four disorders likely refer to the four humors, which are blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. By saying the four disorders "contended" in Felix's body, the speaker illustrates the way Felix's body became a battleground between himself and his illness. It is not immediately clear that this sentence is a continuation of the question "O is he dead then?" but this is made clear by the question mark at its end. The way the speaker extends the question shows how he becomes easily consumed by his memories of the sick man.
The next stanza begins bluntly and briefly: "Sickness broke him." The speaker seems to shake himself out of his memories to state the facts of the situation. He says, "Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended/Being anointed and all." An internal rhyme appears between "cursed" and "first," and a subtle assonance occurs between "Impatient" and "mended." Sound pushes this poem forward. The speaker enabled Felix to reconcile with his mortality by anointing him.
The next lines read, "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 sounds that are repeated here, "h," "s," "r," are slightly softer than the repetitions of "t" and "r" that appear earlier. The poem's tone becomes slightly dreamy with the mention of "reprieve and ransom," which refers to the Last Rites the speaker performed to absolve Felix of his sins before his death. "Ah well" echoes the tone of "O is he dead then?" with its resignation to reality. The speaker feels, or attempts to feel, acceptance; his emotions strain against it, but he does not express anguish.
In the next line, the speaker thinks about what he learned from Felix's illness: "This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears." Not only did the speaker feel for Felix, but Felix felt for him as well, touched by his kindness. This line also marks the turn in the poem, and the speaker briefly seems to zoom out to look at illness more generally. However, in the next lines, he's closer to Felix than ever: "My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,/Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;" while examining the points of contact between them, the speaker becomes overwhelmed by sorrow for the first time. The woeful repetition of "Pining, pining" from earlier in the poem feels much more controlled than the stuttering repetition here, "child, Felix, poor Felix Randal." With this outburst the speaker interrupts himself, unable to go on about the connection between himself and Felix. It fits that this stanza is a tercet instead of a quatrain; the shorter length of the stanza lends it the sensation of being cut or choked off.
The next stanza reads, "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!" The speaker floats away from the present to a time when this future could not have been predicted. He imagines seeing Felix at a "grim forge," the darkness of the forge juxtaposed against the "bright" hoof of the horse that Felix works on. This image of Felix is the most prominent image in the poem; Felix is bright against the darkness, large against his peers. The rhythm here mimics the noise of his hammer, and the repetitions of consonants and vowels—for example, "great grey" and "grey drayhorse"—also lend the lines a pounding sensation.
The answer is not delivered cryptically through metaphor or symbol. It is not couched in the abstruse code of sophisticated literary technique. The priest arrives at a justifiable answer for why someone like Felix Randal might suffer so horribly as part of God’s larger plan: “This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.” The poem is basically making the argument that suffering exists among humans specifically so that we as a species might develop sympathy and empathy and in so doing evolve beyond the base primal instinct of self-interested survival. It is not just that suffering is necessary, but that seeing this suffering is necessary.
In the end, the poem suggests that it is only through the experience of dealing with misery second-hand through contact with others that we can learn to appreciate our own freedom from suffering, while it allows us to take comfort in the expectation that our own need for spiritual and physical caretaking will be facilitated by others.
