The spare room novel

While it does not have the neat theological tieing-of-loose-ends of Hopkins’ poem (a re-assuring confidence that deserted himĪt times, allowing for the writing of those masterpieces knonw as the ‘terrible sonnets’), it has frankness, humour, and warmthĪs its consolations.

Helen Garner’s elegant and moving novel The Spare Room is, in a sense, a secular treatment of the same subject, and Searchingįor meaning, the optimistic priest sees in the illness that has reduced the powerful blacksmith a metaphor for creation,

Hopkins’ poem is a meditation on terminal illness coming from the perspective of a religious man in a religious age. Pining, pining, til time when reason rambled in it and some four fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all Who have watched this mould of a man, big-boned and hardy. Write the poem Felix Randall, after tending to a dying blacksmith over a number of months.įelix Randall the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended, In the 1870s when Jesuit poet (now there’s a combination) Gerard Manley Hopkins was working as a parish priest, he was moved to