ellauri095.html on line 246: In 1874 Hopkins returned to Manresa House to teach classics. While studying in the Jesuit house of theological studies, St Beuno´s College, near St Asap in North Wales, he was asked by his religious superior to write a poem to commemorate the foundering of a German ship in a storm. So in 1875 he took up poetry once more to write a lengthy piece, "The Wreck of the Deutschland", inspired by the Deutschland incident, a maritime disaster in which 157 people died, including five Franciscan nuns who had been leaving Germany due to harsh anti-Catholic laws (see Kulturkampf). The work displays both the religious concerns and some of the unusual metre and rhythms of his subsequent poetry not present in his few remaining early works. It not only depicts the dramatic events and heroic deeds, but tells of him reconciling the terrible events with God´s higher purpose. The poem was accepted but not printed by a Jesuit publication. This rejection fed his ambivalence about his poetry, most of which remained unpublished until after his death.
ellauri095.html on line 508: This potential for a new sacramental poetry was first realized by Hopkins in The Wreck of the Deutschland. Hopkins recalled that when he read about the wreck of the German ship Deutschland off the coast of England it “made a deep impression on me, more than any other wreck or accident I ever read of,” a statement made all the more impressive when we consider the number of shipwrecks he must have discussed with his father. Hopkins wrote about this particular disaster at the suggestion of Fr. James Jones, Rector of St. Beuno’s College, where Hopkins studied theology from 1874 to 1877. Hopkins recalled that “What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for [presumably ‘Rosa Mystica’ and ‘Ad Mariam’]. But when in the winter of ’75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realized on paper.”
ellauri095.html on line 512: The Wreck of the Deutschland became the occasion for Hopkins’s incarnation as a poet in his own right. He broke with the Keatsian wordpainting style with which he began, replacing his initial prolixity, stasis, and lack of construction with a concise, dramatic unity. He rejected his original attraction to Keats’s sensual aestheticism for a clearly moral, indeed a didactic, rhetoric. He saw nature not only as a pleasant spectacle as Keats had; he also confronted its seemingly infinite destructiveness as few before or after him have done. In this shipwreck he perceived the possibility of a theodicy, a vindication of God’s justice which would counter the growing sense of the disappearance of God among the Victorians. For Hopkins, therefore, seeing more clearly than ever before the proselytic possibilities of art, his rector’s suggestion that someone write a poem about the wreck became the theological sanction he needed to begin reconciling his religious and poetic vocations.
ellauri095.html on line 514: Nevertheless, although The Wreck of the Deutschland was a great breakthrough to the vision of God immanent in nature and thus to the sacramentalism that was to be the basis of the great nature poems of the following years, when Hopkins sent the poem to his friend Robert Bridges, Bridges refused to reread it despite Hopkins’s pleas. The poem was also rejected by the Jesuit magazine the Month, primarily because of its new “sprung” rhythm, and many subsequent readers have had difficulty with it as well.
ellauri095.html on line 546: The phrase “And birds that call/Hoarse to the storm,” invites comparison with the son’s images of the windhover rebuffing the big wind in “The Windhover” (1877) and with the image of the great storm fowl at the conclusion of “Henry Purcell” (1879). The father’s prophecy, “thy sport is with the storm/To wrestle” is fulfilled in Gerard’s The Wreck of the Deutschland and “The Loss of the Eurydice” (1878). These two shipwreck poems, replete with spiritual instruction for those in doubt and danger were the son’s poetic and religious counterparts to his father’s 1873 volume, The Port of Refuge, or advice and instructions to the Master-Mariner in situations of doubt, difficulty, and danger.
ellauri095.html on line 550: Compare Gerard Manley Hopkins’s version of an attempted rescue with the account in the London Times, one of the sources he used for The Wreck of the Deutschland. According to the Times, “One brave sailor, who was safe in the rigging went down to try to save a child or woman who was drowning on deck. He was secured by a rope to the rigging, but a wave dashed him against the bulwark, and when daylight dawned his headless body, detained by the rope, was swinging to and fro with the waves.” Hopkins wrote:
ellauri095.html on line 570: The Wreck of the ‘Deutschland’
ellauri095.html on line 578: The loss of any emigrant ship had a strong international dimension and was accordingly extensively reported in English in both the ´Times´ of London and the ´New York Times´, for there was a sad irony in the deaths of passengers who had taken ship in search of a better life. Five Franciscan nuns from Salzkotten (now in Nordrhein-Westfalen, western Germany), named Barbara Hultenschmidt, Henrika Fassbender, Norbeta Reinkobe, Aurea Badziura and Brigitta Damhorst, died in the wreck. They were fleeing religious oppression at home as a result of anti-Catholic laws enacted as part of Otto von Bismarck´s ´Kulturkampf´ ("culture struggle") aimed at building centralised and unified German state resisting outside influences. One reader moved by the story in the London press was the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote a moving and highly romanticised poem based on the incident, ´The Wreck of the Deutschland´. As Hopkins put it: ´Rhine refused them: Thames would ruin them´.
xxx/ellauri251.html on line 1136: Wrecks from afar overseas
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