Poetry
The Wreck of the Deutschland
Gerard Manley Hopkins · 1918
Opening lines
Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World's strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living & dead;
Text quoted from rpo.library.utoronto.ca
Synopsis
An ode in two parts and thirty-five stanzas of eight lines. In the first, the poet addresses the God who masters him, “giver of breath and bread”, and tells of his experience of Him. The second recounts the wreck of a steamer that left Bremen and ran aground at night on the Kentish Knock, at the mouth of the Thames, in December 1875. On board are five Franciscan nuns driven out of Germany by the Falk Laws; in the storm, the tallest of them calls on Christ.
Context
The poem arose from a suggestion by the rector of the Jesuit college of St Beuno's, in north Wales, who had said he wished someone would write about the wreck. Its author achieved there for the first time a new rhythm that haunted his ear and that he called sprung rhythm. The laws that had driven out the nuns bore the name of the minister Adalbert Falk and belonged to Bismarck's struggle against the Catholic Church. The text did not appear until 1918, in Robert Bridges's edition, who compared it to a great dragon couched at the gate to forbid entrance and advised approaching the poems through other pieces.
Who it is for
Two hundred and eighty lines, difficult to read by the admission of its first editor himself; several bilingual translations into French since 1964.
Prizes and reception
His first publisher would not reread it for anything in the world; Universalis writes that this ode alone would make its author's fame.
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