While dying a farrier came to mind
JOE BENNETT
So there I was dying. Seven in the morning down by the waterside, no one about but the dog, and I was dying. I’d had flu for a couple of days and now I was bent over double in a frenzied fit of coughing, gagging, unable to shift a throat block, phlegm or whatever. After every rasping gasp it clamped back shut and induced a reflex survival response over which I had no control. Puce-faced, goggle-eyed I was watching my physiology panic. I was watching myself die.
So was the dog. He was stood a yard or two off, hearing me bray like a donkey, watching my spine buck like a rodeo ride, and not apparently caring about the outcome one way or the other.
You’ll be astonished to know it came out okay. Just as weakness overwhelmed me and I felt sure to pass out, one last fierce cough shifted the blockage, the phlegm flew, and I had a windpipe again, air, life. I fell to my knees on the gravel, whoozy and weak, put my hands down, four legged like the dog, eyes watering, enfeebled.
But even as I sagged with survival, even as I dropped and drooped, even as the dog snuffled around me intrigued by my descent to his level, a line of poetry came to mind, a line from Hopkins. And it hasn’t left since. God, he was good, Hopkins. How I’d love to write one line, just one line, as good as the one that came to mind as I knelt on the darkling wharf. Even as I panted with recovery I smiled at the bang-right truth of it, giggled at the irony.
If you’re familiar with Hopkins, Gerard Manly Hopkins, the Victorian poet, the tortured priest, you can turn the page now. You’ll learn nothing new here. But if you’re not, well, I hope you find something of what he has given to millions.
The poem concerns Felix Randall, a farrier, a shoer of horses. Though of course that’s not how Hopkins put it. Hopkins describes how the ‘‘big-boned and hardy handsome,’’ farrier would ‘‘fetter for the great grey dray horse his bright and battering sandal’’.
There you get a taste of Hopkins’ unique compression, the energy of his words. There’s no one like him.
But the poem begins quietly, casually. ‘‘Felix Randall, the farrier, oh he is dead then?’’ This is the offhand tone of the Jesuit priest to whom death is nothing. What matters is whether the dead man had made his peace with god. If he had then all was well. And Felix Randall had.
Hopkins describes how illness had broken the big man, had withered his flesh and battered his pride until finally, writhing on a bed of pain, he had yielded to the priest, confessed to god, been forgiven his sins and made his peace. After that, to the priestly poet, his death was a matter of no importance.
In the last stanza Hopkins addresses the dead farrier directly, reminding him how blind to the future he had been when young and strong, how he had failed to see anything of what time had in store. And this is how he put it: ‘‘How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years.’’
Which is the line that came to me as I knelt gasping. Let me repeat it. It deserves repetition as few lines do. ‘‘How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years.’’
As I knelt there recovering, those 11 words sang to me. Sixty years of relatively boisterous life leading only to death from coughing, by the wine-dark sea on the wet gravel, barking like a seal, 30 kilos overweight, and accompanied by a dog. Ha. The bathos of destiny. You have to laugh. But how far from then forethought of.
My mother at 94, demented, aggressive, bewildered, incontinent, not knowing that she is any of these things, she who spent 30 years raising a family of four, mother-birding them, clucking and fussing and salving all wounds, the all-competent mother. How far from then forethought of.
The line encapsulates our dim apprehension of time, our turning our backs on it, our wilful, necessary blinkers, what Larkin called our self-protecting ignorance.
Hopkins was five foot two inches tall. He suffered from depression. He died of typhoid fever at the age of 45. None of his poems were published in his life time. And his last words were, ‘‘I am so happy. I am so happy. I loved my life.’’
(On the way back to the car I tried to concoct a priestly poem myself, but struggled for obvious reasons. Here’s all I managed: Very few things could convince me Jesus Christ had risen One of those few things would be Seeing Trump in prison. We can’t all be Hopkins.)