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Przemysław Michalski
Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny, Kraków
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TWO POEMS: GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS’S
‘FELIX RANDAL’ AND RONALD STUART THOMAS’S ‘EVANS’
1. Introduction: biographical information
In this paper I would like to compare two poems written by two priest–poets (Gerard
Manley Hopkins and Ronald Stuart Thomas), which speak about the relationship between the
priest and a dying parishioner. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Victorian priest-
poet, who first converted to Catholicism, and then took an even more radical decision of
joining the Society of Jesus. He remained a Jesuit for the rest of his life, working devotedly in
a number of parishes around the country before being offered a teaching post in Dublin,
where he spent the last seven years of his life. Misunderstood by his contemporaries, he saw
only a small handful of his poems published during his lifetime. The first major edition of his
works appeared in 1918, almost thirty years after his death. Nowadays Hopkins is regarded as
one of the greatest English religious poets, a worthy successor of John Donne and George
Herbert.
Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000) was a major religious poet, who despite being
born in Wales and feeling very patriotic about his homeland, wrote almost exclusively in
English. He often lamented the fact that it was English, and not Welsh, that was his first
language, and therefore as a poet he was forced to write in English in spite of his fervent wish
to write about Wales in her vernacular. He always blamed the English for this handicap,
which cut him off from the most natural mode of expression for a Welsh poet: “England, what
have you done to make the speech / My fathers used a stranger at my lips” (‘The Old
Language’, l.1-2). His position as one of the most outstanding and important poets of our
times was confirmed in 1996 when he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
2. 1. Some similarities between Hopkins and Thomas
As Professor Teresa Bela remarks in her comparative analysis of R. S. Thomas and
George Herbert:
Comparing the work of poets from distant epochs is rarely a fruitful activity: it is natural that the
differences in content and form must outnumber any similarities, and the reasons are usually

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explained by the passage of time. In the case of religious poetry, however, there is more ground
for and more meaning in such parallels and contrasts since the point of reference of the speakers
and the addressee of the poems remain the same in any century, whereas differences in form and
content may elucidate aesthetic and ontological changes that have taken place between the two
periods. (Bela 2004:85)
These observations are also pertinent to the issues I set out to explore in this paper. In fact,
when writing about Ronald Stuart Thomas’s 1978 collection Laboratories of the Spirit, A.M.
Allchin claimed that the Welsh poet could be named in the same breath with the above-
mentioned giants of religious verse: “It becomes clear […] that we are encountering a major
religious poet, one who is rightly to be compared with the greatest of his predecessors, a
George Herbert, a Gerard Manley Hopkins” (Allchin 1978:325).
Thomas’s poetry, famous for its lucidity and curtness, is also distinguished by what
Professor John Press calls “a rare harshness and pungency of concept and of phrase” (Press
1963:140). His early work revolves around a cluster of a few recurrent themes, such as the
beauty of the Welsh countryside and its intermediary role as a sign pointing to the even
greater beauty of its creator, descriptions of harsh living conditions of Welsh farmers and
Thomas’s relationship with his parishioners. Later, especially from his 1972 collection H’m
onwards, his attention turns more to the problem of God’s presence in the world and God-man
relationship.
Apart from the fact that for both poets God remains the ultimate addressee of their
work, we can observe another interesting similarity as both the Jesuit priest and the Anglican
priest seem more in tune with nature than with their parishioners, and find it easier to glean
the presence of God from lakes and forests than towns or cities. Thomas frequently
denounced the ominous yet seemingly ineluctable approach of what he was in the habit of
calling ‘The Machine’, while Hopkins famously wrote about the earth being “seared with
trade, bleared, smeared with toil” (‘God’s Grandeur’, l.6). More importantly, at one point in
their poetic careers, they both focused on the theme of God’s absence from the world, but
whereas Hopkins’s experience is more immediate and more fervently communicated to the
reader, esp. in his famous dark sonnets written in Ireland, Thomas’s poems are more
philosophical in content and less challenging in form with the speaker calmly contemplating
the paradoxical dialectics of God’s immanence and transcendence. Probably the most famous
expression thereof can be found in the poem ‘Via Negativa’, whose very title recalls St. John
of the Cross’s notion of the dark night of the soul:

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Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find (l. 1-6)
In another poem the poet says the following about the incomprehensible tension between
God’s active presence in the world, which underlies the whole of reality, and His seeming
withdrawal from it: “It is this great absence / that is like a presence, that compels / me to
address it without hope / of a reply” (‘The Absence’, l. 1-4).
2.2. The priest and his flock
Another theme frequently explored by the Welsh poet is the problem of the
relationship between himself and his flock. It has to be admitted that Thomas does not seem to
be particularly enthusiastic about, or even charitable towards, those entrusted to his spiritual
care. His poems on the theme, especially those written in the early decades of his career, all
share one rather disturbing characteristic: the poet is at pains to distance himself from the
Welsh farmers and all they stand for. He often writes about them with a chilling detachment,
which sometimes slips into a disgusted contempt for their narrow-mindedness and lack of
sophistication:
Unnatural and inhuman, your wild ways
Are not sanctioned: you are condemned
By man’s potential stature. The two things
That could redeem your ignorance, the beauty
And grace that trees and flowers labour to teach,
Were never yours, you shut your heart against them.
You stopped your ears to the soft influence
Of birds, preferring the dull tone
Of the thick blood, the loud, unlovely rattle
Of mucous in the throat, the shallow stream
Of neighbours’ trivial talk. (‘Valediction’ l. 19-29)
This unmitigated loathing of the Welsh peasants comes through even more vividly in another
poem, where it is further strengthened by the speaker’s feeling of frustration at his failure as a
priest, and his inability to engage his flock with the mysteries of liturgy and faith:

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Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales,
With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females,
How I have hated you for your irreverence, your scorn even
Of the refinements of art and the mysteries of the Church. (‘A Priest to his People’, l.1-4)
Professor Barnie’s commentary on Thomas’s spiritual autobiography Neb is more than
relevant to this group of poems: “What is surprising in Neb is the apparent absence of charity,
which, one would think, must have made his vocation unendurable at times” (Barnie
1986:105).
Thomas’s feelings towards the Welsh farmers - which are in fact far more complex
and ambivalent than the above-quoted lines would indicate - are epitomized in the well-
known figure of Iago Prytherch:
Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction. (‘A Peasant’ l.1-6)
At the same time, Thomas seems to have a grudging admiration for the farmer’s ability to
focus on the raw task of surviving in the harsh conditions of the Welsh farms and hills even if
that means closing his eyes and stopping his ears to the divine music of nature and art. There
is a sort of primitive wisdom in such an attitude of unquestioning endurance; unlike the
refined poet, the peasant does not try to feel at one with nature, but by submitting himself
entirely to its cyclical rhythms, he becomes an element of his environment in an almost literal
fashion:
He will go on; that much is certain.
Beneath him tenancies of the fields
Will change; machinery turn
All to noise. But on the walls
Of the mind’s gallery that face
With the hills framing it will hang
Unglorified, but stern like the soil (‘The Face’ l.24-30).

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2.3. ‘Felix Randal’ and ‘Evans’ - a comparative analysis
The poems in which Hopkins writes about the priest-parishioner relationship may be
outnumbered by Thomas’s poems on the same theme, but at least they are not so jarringly
lacking in the spirit of charity. Quite the contrary, such poems as ‘Felix Randal’, or the
notoriously convoluted ‘Harry Ploughman’, show true compassion and empathy with those
under his spiritual care.
‘Felix Randal’ is not commonly considered to be one of Hopkins’s best poems even
though Paul Mariani in his fine commentary on Hopkins’s work claims that it is “an
astonishingly complex emotional performance which succeeds simultaneously as elegy and as
Christian celebration of the final victory over death” (Mariani 1970:167). It was written by
Hopkins during his grinding work in the poverty-stricken districts of Liverpool; in a letter to
Robert Bridges, the poet has the following to say about the immediate circumstances of its
inception: “The parish work of Liverpool is very wearying to mind and body and leaves me
nothing but odds and ends of time” (Mariani 1970:166). The poem is almost certainly based
on a real event as ministering to the sick and the dying belonged to Hopkins’s sacerdotal
duties, even though most probably ‘Felix Randal’ was not the farrier’s real name.
Both poems start with the name of the dead parishioner, but whereas in ‘Felix Randal’
the priest seems to have just learnt about the death of the smith (“Felix Randal the farrier, O
he is dead then?” l.1) in the other poem the speaker’s memory has been unexpectedly jogged
by some external event or a question, and he needs a while to put the name to the face.
Moreover, in the Victorian poem the priest has all the facts ‘at his fingertips’: he immediately
recalls the occupation and the last days of the deceased blacksmith; in the other poem, by
contrast, we are simply left with the name followed by a question mark. This feeling of
intimacy in the first poem is further strengthened by Hopkins’s use of Yorkshire dialect: “all
road he ever offended” (l.8). As Paul Mariani remarks:
Recalling the confrontation of the grim fact of death which he shared with the blacksmith, the
priest remembers that he had given the dying farrier, along with the sacraments, consolation and
hope, that he had been touched himself in the terrible encounter (Mariani 1970:167).
The second stanza records a sort of metamorphosis, almost a metanoia, of the dying farrier
with his initial defiance slowly giving way to the recognition of God’s will at work in his
predicament and Christian acceptance of his destiny:
Sickness broke him. Impatient he cursed at first, but mended

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Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
Tendered to him. (l.5-8)
In ‘Evans’, by contrast, there is just intensification of the darkness, which is growing more
and more impenetrable. In contrast to the priest in who can bring comfort to the disease-
stricken smith (“Touch had quenched thy tears”, l.9), the Anglican minister is incapable of
offering any sort of consolation, whether physical, mental or spiritual. His ineffectuality as a
spiritual comforter is made evident as early as the first line, where he admits plainly that
“many a time” he visited the dying farmer, thus implying that on none of those occasions did
he manage to alleviate Evans’s anguish. There is something deeply unsettling in the speaker’s
inability, passivity, or even refusal, to ‘take arms against’ the sea of darkness silting up the
veins of Evans. Tony Brown makes the following comment: “[…] there is no hint that the
priest has succeeded in conveying this message of hope. The poem expresses the narrator’s
sense of isolation as well as Evans’s” (Brown 2006:37).
This seems to be the greatest single difference between the two poems as the priest in
Hopkins’s poem believes in an almost semi-magical efficacy of sacraments, whereas Thomas
plainly admits defeat by saying that he left his parishioner “stranded upon the vast / And
lonely shore of his bleak bed” (l.15-16). At the same time one can detect a note of genuine
compassion beneath the helplessness of the priest facing the unalterable fact of death, but the
compassion is underpinned by the feeling of agonizing powerlessness. In fact, there is
something almost Larkinesque in the intense sadness, the quiet assertion of despair, and the
unflinching focus on the drabness of Evans’s uneventful existence and his slow dissolution.
Hopkins’s is a two-way spiritual commerce since both the priest and the blacksmith
are transformed by the experience as is evidenced by the seventh line of the poem: “This
seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.” In ‘Evans’, by contrast, both the
speaker-priest and the sick farmer appear to be almost solipsistically insulated in their
separate selfhoods. The whole poem is permeated with a feeling of hopeless resignation to the
destructive forces of time and sickness gnawing away at Evans. The number of words which
have negative, or downright chilling undertones, is startlingly great for a poem of just sixteen
lines. Thomas creates the atmosphere of oppressive gloom and all-pervading bleakness with
such phrases as “bare flight / Of stairs” (l.2-3), “gaunt kitchen” (l.3), “black kettle” (l.5),
“stark farm” (l.9), and “bleak bed” (l.16). These not only set the tone of the poem, but also are
objective correlatives of the drabness of Evans’s existence. This joyless anthology of
everyday objects which the priest sees around him is just a random collection of insignificant

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items, which further stresses the contingence of Evans’s existence and its impending
termination. Things are just things and not signs or symbols pointing beyond themselves to
something else.
With a vision of Randal in his prime in the last stanza, Hopkins ends his poem on an
unambiguously upbeat note; this is not mere naive sentimentality which tries to find comfort
in memory, or illusion, when confronted with the fact of death. Hopkins’s cheerfulness stems
from his unshakeable belief that what he was in the habit of calling ‘inscape’ is essentially
indestructible; that no matter how lowly or insignificant in the eyes of the world, in the eyes
of God the farrier is an ‘immortal diamond’ (‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the
comfort of Resurrection’ l .24).
In ‘Evans’, by contrast, Thomas employs a superbly precise, but also profoundly
unsettling, metaphor of the dark ‘silting up’ the veins of the dying parishioner (l.14). In the
first stanza it is just the physical darkness filling the poky interior of Evans’s house. In the
second stanza the darkness assumes a more metaphorical character; it may be taken to
represent the devastating advances of the illness, but also, in a more Heideggerian vein, it may
be read to symbolize Evan’s slow descent into the darkness of death. It may also be
interpreted as denoting the suffocating darkness of despair to which Evans seems to have
succumbed long ago. In the writings of mystical authors darkness is often seen as a means of
purgation, the via negativa of St. John of the Crosss, of which Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets’
are such a moving testimony, but the darkness silting up the veins of the Welsh farmer is
distinctly destructive. It does not point forward to reaching another rung up the ladder of
mystical ascent, but is instead symbolic of a terminable disease which does not bring any kind
of spiritual maturation.
Evans’s agony and loneliness are further emphasized by the presence of the “weather –
tortured tree”, which may symbolise both the crucifix, and the cross of illness he has to bear.
The tree, which in the context of Christian poetry always has the potential of becoming
symbolic of Christ’s victory over death, remains just an untenanted tree without being
transformed into an instrument of redemption. As Pikoulis observes: “Nothing alleviates
Evans's expiry, neither the visit of the priest nor the echo of the Christian crucifixion in the
weather-tortured tree; it remains only weather-tortured, incapable of yielding a meaning from
the sacrifice” (Pikoulis 1993:27).
The content of each poem is further accentuated by the range and sheer number of
poetic devices used by each poet; ‘Felix Randal’ is a lavishly embellished poem, carefully
structured on sprung rhythm. It makes use of alliteration (“big-boned”, “hardy-handsome”,

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“fatal four disorders fleshed there”), consonance (“touched quenched thy tears, This seeing
the sick endears them to us, us too it endears”) and assonance (“My tongue had taught thee
comfort, touch had quenched thy tears”) while ‘Evans’ is deliberately stark and bare. In this
way the emotional and spiritual aridity of his life is reflected in the austerity of the poem
itself. It should be noted, however, that there may be a rather cruel and slightly cynical pun
on ‘appalled’, which conjures up the image of the ‘pall’ in which Evans’s cold body will be
soon wrapped.
Moreover, Hopkins feels he needs to re-contextualise the situation by giving his
parishioner a name pregnant with symbolic overtones; Paul Mariani has the following
comment:
Hopkins had too fine a sense of Victorian decorum to use it, and in all of his poems he almost
never gives us a contemporary’s name. “Randal” is of Anglo-Saxon origin and means a “shield”
[…] Felix, of course, is Latin for “happy” or “blessed”, so that the farrier’s name both harks to
his “more boisterous years,” when he plied his trade with rough good nature, and simultaneously
points ahead to the purer and permanent joy of the “heavenlier” blacksmith, now sacramentally
shielded and protected for the final journey into eternity (Mariani 1970: 171).
I have not been able to ascertain whether ‘Evans’ is based on a real event, but it seems
significant that Thomas makes use of a name which is quite common. In the Hopkins’s poem,
the blacksmith is wafted out of the tragic circumstances by being dignified with a
symbolically-laden name, while the mediocrity of Evans’s existence is also reflected in his
name.
2.4. The question of context
The problem of context forces one to look at the ‘bigger picture’ beyond the
immediate circumstances of the composition of the poems. We cannot dismiss the question of
the differences between them by saying that they simply result from the differences in the
personalities of both poets. They also evidence a larger philosophical shift towards darkness,
which took place in the 20th
century and speaks volumes about the general Zeitgeist of the
age.
It is banal to say that every poem is created in some context, but like many platitudes
also this one is true, and it is particularly true about religious poetry, which often mirrors the
intellectual and spiritual climate of a given epoch. The spirit of the age is likely to insinuate
itself even into the most intimate religious verse. Thus, the world in which Evans is slowly
dying is the world of Nietzschean contingency, Larkinesque mediocrity, Beckettian void,

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Webberian disenchantment, and Heideggerian time-manacled universe. It is a universe from
which the Arnoldian sea of faith has ebbed away, leaving only the “naked shingles of the
world.” Thomas’s poem was clearly written in a post-Nietzschean world, where God is dead,
while ordinary Christians and their spiritual guides have to come to terms with this fact. With
the death of God it is no longer possible to believe in the efficacy of Christian sacraments the
way both Hopkins and those entrusted to his spiritual care took for granted back in the 19th
century. Thus, where Hopkins ministers to the spiritual needs of Felix Randal and smoothes
his departure out of this vale of tears, Thomas feels utterly helpless when confronted with “the
darkness silting up” the veins of one of his parishioners. He can keep him silent company, but
to tender to him what Hopkins calls “our sweet reprieve and ransom” (l.7), which could
“quench his tears” would appear pointless, if not downright absurd, to both the priest and the
parishioner. They both inhabit a world in which sacraments have lost their spiritually
therapeutic potential.
In order to understand the spiritual predicament of the 20th
century it is necessary to go
back to the 19th. The decisive event which underlies the desperate search for meaning and the
angst of the 20th century is the loss of God as experienced by many in the Victorian period.
Hopkins, however, seems to be – for a number of various reasons – strangely unaffected by
what J. Hillis Miller famously called ‘the disappearance of God.’ We know from his letters
and journals that he often deplored the impiety and immorality of his contemporaries, but for
him the term ‘disappearance of God’ always rang a truly personal note. He felt agony over his
own sense of being deserted by God as is evidenced in his celebrated ‘Terrible Sonnets,’
where he cries in despair: “Comforter, where, where is your comforting? / Mary, mother of
us, where is your relief?” (‘No worst’ l.3-4). Apart from such deeply intimate anguish, his
work is almost completely unaffected by the scientific discoveries in geology, biology and
biblical studies, which completely shattered the faith of some of his contemporaries, such as
Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough.
The Welsh priest-poet, by contrast, is acutely aware of and deeply affected by the
general intellectual and spiritual malaise of the 20th
century, in which all the ‘old certainties’
can no longer be readily embraced, not even by the clergy. In an interview he had the
following to say about religion and faith:
I find it very difficult to be a kind of orthodox believer in Jesus as my saviour and that sort of
thing; resurrection is a metaphor – I can't definitely say to you, oh definitely I believe I am going
to live again, I am going to be raised: I am on a kind of neutral ground, I leave it to God. […]
We use these words, like "resurrection"--what does that really mean, what is going to be

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resurrected? ... [If] He's going to resurrect people in His own time, He will resurrect them –
(Thomas 2001:98).
He then goes on to speak about religion and poetry in a distinctly Arnoldian fashion: “Poetry
is religion, religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet,
the New Testament is a metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor” (Thomas 1966:169). It is
not entirely clear whether Thomas wants to emphasize the poetic dimension of the New
Testament and Christianity itself, or whether he is questioning the historical foundations of
Christianity by reducing the Resurrection to a metaphor, but he seems to be leaning towards
the latter. He adds: “Jesus was a poet.... In another sense, he is God’s metaphor.... [And] how
shall we attempt to describe or express ultimate reality except through metaphor or symbol?"
(Thomas 1966:169).
3. Concluding remarks
In the poem discussed in this paper we can how Thomas’s inability to believe that Christianity
and Christian rites are more than just metaphors undermine his priestly ministry and what one
might call the ‘spiritual efficiency’ of his work among the Welsh farmers. On the other hand,
one might suppose that by conflating theology and poetry, Thomas intimates that even though
he cannot save Evans from drifting down into the darkness of despair and death, by
ministering sacraments to him, he is ready to acknowledge his sacerdotal responsibility, and
also admit failure, through poetry. Or perhaps this gesture is in fact more affirmative than
that; maybe through the very act of writing a poem about the dead parishioner, Thomas tries
to salvage what he can from the wreckage of Evans’s life, and – again in a distinctly
Arnoldian manner - implies that even though religion can no longer stop the darkness silting
up his veins, or even quench Evans’s tears, poetry can. He hopes to succeed as a poet where
he has failed as a priest.
References
Allchin, A.M. (1978). Emerging: A look at some of R.S. Thomas’ more recent poems.
Theology LXXX 683: 325-361.
Barnie, J. (1986). Across the Grain. Planet 56: 101-106.

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Bela, Teresa. (2004). Priest at prayer: some reflections on the poetry of George Herbert and
Ronald Stuart Thomas. In: Reaching to the Centre, Reaching to the Margins. B.A.S. Vol. X:
85-95.
Brown, T. (2006). Writers of Wales: R.S. Thomas. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Gardner W.H., MacKenzie N.H. (1970). The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Reading:
Oxford University Press.
Mariani, P. L. (1970). A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
London: Cornell University Press.
Pikoulis, J., Roberts, M. (1993). R.S. Thomas's existential agony. Poetry Wales. Vol. 29, No
1: 26-32.
Press, John. (1963). Rule And Energy, Trends In British Poetry Since The Second World War.
London: Oxford University Press.
Thomas in conversation, Interview with Molly Price-Owen. (2001) The David Jones Journal:
93-102.
Thomas R.S. (1993). Collected Poems:1945-1990. London: Phoenix.
Thomas, R. S. (1966). A Frame for Poetry. The Times Literary Supplement. 3 March: 169.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Przemysław Michalski, “A Comparative Study of Two Poems:
G. M. Hopkins’s ‘Felix Randal’ and R. S. Thomas's ‘Evans.’” The Contextuality of Language
and Culture. Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, Agnieszka Gołda-Derejczyk (eds.) Bielsko-
Biała: Wyższa Szkoła Ekonomiczno-Humanistyczna 2009, pp. 203-216.