There aren’t perhaps many canonical poems written about Liverpool blacksmiths, but there is ‘Felix Randal’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), which is one of the poet’s most famous poems and, like all of Hopkins’s work, deserves closer analysis. Before we offer some notes towards a commentary on this wonderful poem, […]
‘My own heart let me more have pity on; let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind, / Charitable’: so begins this sonnet by one of the Victorian era’s most innovative poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89). Written in the mid-1880s in Ireland, when Hopkins was suffering from depression, […]
A commentary on one of Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets’ The mid-1880s was not a good time for Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lonely in Ireland, the poet fell into a black pit of depression, out of which came the ‘Terrible Sonnets’ which represent, after his flurry of creativity in 1876-77, the most productive […]