he had taken communion and confessed his sins:  Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some/ Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom/ Tendered to him.’ Hopkins uses a colloquial phrase from the working-class Liverpool dialect: ‘Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!’ This serves two purposes. Firstly, it embeds this poem in a particular time and place and it would have been something Felix himself said. Secondly, it is the kind of phrase we all use at such a time.


 to be able to care for the sick in a compassionate and loving way: ‘This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.’ Hopkins thinks that you can’t help but become emotionally involved when you are caring for someone. They are endearing to you because of their vulnerability and you become endearing to them because they are grateful for your care. It also endears us to ourselves, in our pride at such important work and in our gratitude for our own health. Hopkins’ words comforted Felix and he dried Felix’s tears: ‘My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears’ touched Hopkins deeply: ‘Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal’. There is something very poignant about how he calls Felix a child.


 and death would have been far from Felix’s mind during his years of good health, when he was the strongest of all his peers: ‘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 last line uses hyperbole to glorify Felix’s work as a blacksmith with the adjectives ‘great’, meaning mighty, and ‘bright’, meaning molten metal, and the verb ‘battering’, meaning to hit with great force. Having focused on Felix’s sickness  


226 VERSE 2025


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