1875 Gerard Manley Hopkins is, with T.S. Eliot, the most influential poet of the 20th century. Had his career in literature been his primary vocation he might have been the most influential poet of the 19th century, in which he lived and died.
A Jesuit priest, Hopkins wrote quantities of verse, a small fragment of which was entrusted, by letter, to his friend Robert Bridges. That fragment is, alas, all that has survived. Hopkins, under instruction from his superiors and his own sense of religious duty, destroyed the bulk of his work. Ironically, Bridges – a Poet Laureate and immensely popular in his own day for bestselling works such as The Testament of Beauty – is remembered, today, for one thing only. He saved some of the poetry of Hopkins.
Hopkins died in 1889: wholly unknown to the reading public. Bridges belatedly published the surviving corpus of his friend’s poems in 1918. The opening poem in the collection, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, Hopkins’s longest, was what Bridges called ‘a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance’. The opening stanza indicates clearly enough what Bridges meant:
THOU mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.
The dragonish difficulty of the poem lies principally in Hopkins’s innovative prosody (‘sprung rhythm’) and the complexity of his literary expression – something alien both to the norms of Victorian poetry (when it was written) and Georgian poetry (when it was published).
The poem has an explanatory dedication:
To the
happy memory of five Franciscan nuns
drowned between midnight and morning of
Dec. 7th, 1875
On 4 December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremerhaven in Germany for New York, via Southampton. Among the passengers were five Franciscan nuns, fleeing Bismarck’s anti-Catholic Falk Laws, part of a programmatic campaign (the so-called Kulturkampf) to secularise – more specifically de-Catholicise – the country. They intended to resettle in a religious community in Illinois.
The vessel ran into a storm and ran aground on a shoal (the Kentish Knock). This was 5 December. Distress rockets attracted no attention from passing ships. The next day the order was given to abandon ship. The lifeboats were inadequate, and one sank. Of the 213 souls on board the Deutschland, only 135 made it to safety (embarrassingly, the captain was one of them – prompting a high-profile court of enquiry: which exonerated him).
Among those drowned were the five Franciscan nuns. Why, Hopkins’s poem ponders, would God persecute the already persecuted in this way? They are, the poem concludes, martyrs. Their suffering is an extreme form of the discipline (‘mastering’) they had chosen as their life with their vows.
Hopkins was, unusually, encouraged to write the poem by his religious superior; but, in the event, it was deemed unpublishable. Bridges, normally sympathetic, concurred. He would not, he told his friend, read it again ‘for any money’. Then read it for love, Hopkins (good-naturedly) replied.