“Widely considered a masterpiece and one of the greatest, most innovative poems in the English language. ” AI Overviews.
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Since the poem itself is so long, as is the exegesis, I have divided the post into two parts, the first, Post One, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” G.M. Hopkins. “A monumental work of literature.” Post One of Two, covering Stanzas 1-10 (Part I), the second, Post Two, here, covering Stanzas 11-35 (Part II).
The entire poem is reprinted below, with analysis following.
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The Wreck of the Deutschland
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875
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Part I
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 & 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.
I did say yes
O at lightning and lashed rod;
Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
Thy terror, O Christ, O God;
Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:
The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod
Hard down with a horror of height:
And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.
The frown of his face
Before me, the hurtle of hell
Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?
I whirled out wings that spell
And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.
My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,
Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,
To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.
I am soft sift
In an hourglass—at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
And it crowds and it combs to the fall;
I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,
But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall
Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein
Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.
I kiss my hand
To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
Glow, glory in thunder;
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:
Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.
Not out of his bliss
Springs the stress felt
Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
Swings the stroke dealt—
Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt—
But it rides time like riding a river
(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).
It dates from day
Of his going in Galilee;
Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;
Manger, maiden’s knee;
The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat;
Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be,
Though felt before, though in high flood yet—
What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay,
Is out with it! Oh,
We lash with the best or worst
Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe
Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,
Gush!—flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,
Brim, in a flash, full!—Hither then, last or first,
To hero of Calvary, Christ,’s feet—
Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it—men go.
Be adored among men,
God, three-numberéd form;
Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,
Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm.
Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,
Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;
Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:
Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.
With an anvil-ding
And with fire in him forge thy will
Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring
Through him, melt him but master him still:
Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul,
Or as Austin, a lingering-out swéet skíll,
Make mercy in all of us, out of us all
Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.
Part II
“Some find me a sword; some
The flange and the rail; flame,
Fang, or flood” goes Death on drum,
And storms bugle his fame.
But wé dréam we are rooted in earth—Dust!
Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,
Wave with the meadow, forget that there must
The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.
On Saturday sailed from Bremen,
American-outward-bound,
Take settler and seamen, tell men with women,
Two hundred souls in the round—
O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing
The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned;
Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing
Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?
Into the snows she sweeps,
Hurling the haven behind,
The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,
For the infinite air is unkind,
And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,
Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.
She drove in the dark to leeward,
She struck—not a reef or a rock
But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her
Dead to the Kentish Knock;
And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel:
The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;
And canvass and compass, the whorl and the wheel
Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.
Hope had grown grey hairs,
Hope had mourning on,
Trenched with tears, carved with cares,
Hope was twelve hours gone;
And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day
Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone,
And lives at last were washing away:
To the shrouds they took,—they shook in the hurling and horrible airs.
One stirred from the rigging to save
The wild woman-kind below,
With a rope’s end round the man, handy and brave—
He was pitched to his death at a blow,
For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew:
They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro
Through the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he do
With the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave?
They fought with God’s cold—
And they could not and fell to the deck
(Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled
With the sea-romp over the wreck.
Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,
The woman’s wailing, the crying of child without check—
Till a lioness arose breasting the babble,
A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.
Ah, touched in your bower of bone
Are you! turned for an exquisite smart,
Have you! make words break from me here all alone,
Do you!—mother of being in me, heart.
O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth,
Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start!
Never-eldering revel and river of youth,
What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own?
Sister, a sister calling
A master, her master and mine!—
And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling;
The rash smart sloggering brine
Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one;
Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine
Ears, and the call of the tall nun
To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm’s brawling.
She was first of a five and came
Of a coifèd sisterhood.
(O Deutschland, double a desperate name!
O world wide of its good!
But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town,
Christ’s lily and beast of the waste wood:
From life’s dawn it is drawn down,
Abel is Cain’s brother and breasts they have sucked the same.)
Loathed for a love men knew in them,
Banned by the land of their birth,
Rhine refused them, Thames would ruin them;
Surf, snow, river and earth
Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light;
Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,
Thou martyr-master: in thy sight
Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them.
Five! the finding and sake
And cipher of suffering Christ.
Mark, the mark is of man’s make
And the word of it Sacrificed.
But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken,
Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced—
Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token
For lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.
Joy fall to thee, father Francis,
Drawn to the Life that died;
With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his
Lovescape crucified
And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters
And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,
Are sisterly sealed in wild waters,
To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.
Away in the loveable west,
On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
And they the prey of the gales;
She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails
Was calling “O Christ, Christ, come quickly”:
The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wildworst Best.
The majesty! what did she mean?
Breathe, arch and original Breath.
Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been?
Breathe, body of lovely Death.
They were else-minded then, altogether, the men
Woke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth.
Or ís it that she cried for the crown then,
The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?
For how to the heart’s cheering
The down-dugged ground-hugged grey
Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing
Of pied and peeled May!
Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,
With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky way,
What by your measure is the heaven of desire,
The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?
No, but it was not these.
The jading and jar of the cart,
Time’s tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease
Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart,
Not danger, electrical horror; then further it finds
The appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart:
Other, I gather, in measure her mind’s
Burden, in wind’s burly and beat of endragonèd seas.
But how shall I . . . make me room there:
Reach me a … Fancy, come faster—
Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there,
Thing that she … there then! the Master,
Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head:
He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her;
Do, deal, lord it with living and dead;
Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there.
Ah! there was a heart right
There was single eye!
Read the unshapeable shock night
And knew the who and the why;
Wording it how but by him that present and past,
Heaven and earth are word of, worded by?—
The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blast
Tarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light.
Jesu, heart’s light,
Jesu, maid’s son,
What was the feast followed the night
Thou hadst glory of this nun?—
Feast of the one woman without stain.
For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done;
But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain,
Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright.
Well, she has thee for the pain, for the
Patience; but pity of the rest of them!
Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the
Comfortless unconfessed of them—
No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence
Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the
Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and
Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee?
I admire thee, master of the tides,
Of the Yore-flood, of the year’s fall;
The recurb and the recovery of the gulf’s sides,
The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall;
Staunching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind;
Ground of being, and granite of it: past all
Grasp God, throned behind
Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides;
With a mercy that outrides
The all of water, an ark
For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides
Lower than death and the dark;
A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison,
The-last-breath penitent spirits—the uttermost mark
Our passion-plungèd giant risen,
The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.
Now burn, new born to the world,
Doubled-naturèd name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled.
Dame, at our door
Drowned, and among our shoals,
Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward:
Our Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish sóuls!
Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,
More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,
Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,
Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.
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Part II consists of 25 stanzas, in the same eight-line format as Part I. It is obviously beyond the purview of this post to treat those 25 stanzas with the same depth of analysis as the first 10 were treated. I will somewhat follow Hopkins’ own advice: do not bother yourself with the meaning [of stanzas you find too obscure], but pay attention to the best and most intelligible stanzas, though also including some “less intelligible” stanzas along with the “best.”
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Stanza 11 is an ominous preface, a memento mori , that in life must/The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.
Stanza 12 is mostly a narrative concerning the ship, its 200 or so souls, and the fatal grounding on a shoal1, with the loss of 50 lives, but it concludes with the same conundrum (lightning and love) so painfully discussed in Part 1: Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing/Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?
The tremendously powerful description of the storm that follows is a masterpiece of sound echoing sense. from the alliterative s‘s (snows/sweeps) and h’s (Hurling the haven behind). and the onomatopoeia of sweeps and hurling and behind, to the tongue-tying emulation of the rollicking waves, And the sea flint-flake, black-backed. Dread is piled upon dread as word-choice cumulatively suggests the helplessness/hopelessness of the ship in the storm: drove, dark, struck, smother, night, dead, Knock, beat, down, breakers, ruinous shock, endured.“
“No one can come from studying [Hopkins’] work without
an extended notion of the resources of English.”2
Stanza 15. The deaths and destruction continued (Hope had grown grey hairs,/Hope had mourning on) without rescue. Focus shifts from narrative to personal as a man emerges from the rigging with a rope tied round his waist in an attempt to save five nuns, only to be toyed with by the wind, abruptly pitched to his death at a blow, then horribly swung back and forth by the wind for hours, dandled the to and fro. Hopkins’ struggle with God’s duality, in this case His anvil-ding, reaches a high pitch here. It is hard not to feel a sense of cruelty, both in the treatment of the seaman and the spectacle of it as observed by the passengers. In the subtext of the storm as a metaphor for Hopkins’ struggles with its “intentions,” we feel the depth of emotions which he “endured,” and the extreme difficulty he had in trying to reconcile God’s duality.
Stanza 17, the halfway point, introduces the complete tone-shifting fulcrum3 of the poem.
They fought with God’s cold—
And they could not and fell to the deck
(Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled
With the sea-romp over the wreck.
Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,
The woman’s wailing, the crying of child without check—
Till a lioness arose breasting the babble,
A prophetess towered in the tumult, a
virginal tongue told.
Out of the swirling, hellish chaos of the storm (babble) emerges (arose) what is perhaps a touch of God’s finger: a towering (towered) lioness, A prophetess, one of the five nuns (virginal), crying out (tongue told; echoing, reverberating like a bell) in her agony, like Christ on the Cross, to Christ on the Cross. Even as The rash smart sloggering brine/Blinds her , her “vision” is laser-focused on one thing, one, only one motivation (fetch), Christ’s Cross. “O Christ, Christ, come quickly” (Stanza 24). The poignancy of the moment is overwhelming.
This clarion call, riding over the storm’s brawling, is not expressed in the poem until Stanza 24, seven stanzas after she first appears. The back-and-forthness of the intervening stanzas echoes the unbearable tumult of the storm, just as the content reveals the nun’s unwavering inscape4, Sister, a sister calling/A master, her master and mine!—.
Stanzas 20-21 provide a somewhat needed pause to the straining intensity of the poem. We learn that the nuns were leaving Germany because of religious persecution: Loathed for a love men knew in them,/ Banned by the land of their birth, Deutschland now double a desperate name, with both Gertrude5, the saint, a lily, and Luther6, a reformer, the beast of the waste wood, two of the town, echoing the poem’s pervading theme of duality (Abel is Cain’s brother), even as the storm itself did (Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them.)
Stanzas 22-23 explore the mystery of this duality. Five, the number of nuns, was also the number of Christ’s wounds and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi7 , the namesake of the nun’s Franciscan order. Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token ; the nuns, as the ship sank, held hands on deck, forming a cinquefoil, a five-petaled flower with hand-shaped leaves.The finding and sake/ And cipher of suffering Christ–linking them and their sacrifice, these thy daughters/ And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,/ Are sisterly sealed in wild waters,/To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances., leading, finally, to Stanza 24.
In Stanzas 25-29 Hopkins addresses the meaning of the nun’s declaration, The majesty! what did she mean?, seeking inspiration from the the Holy Spirit, the original Breath. Was it martyrdom, salvation, relief? He answers in Stanza 27 that, No, but it was not these, or danger, electrical horror. The heart, when sorrow-laden with life’s vicissitudes (the jading and jar of the cart) over time (Time’s tasking) asks for ease and finds that :The appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart. The nun’s words should be seen as a prayer to God. Hopkins’ epiphanic realization is expressed in aposiopesis, employing broken sentences, usually indicated by dashes or periods, to convey emotion so intense that words fail: But how shall I . . . make me room there:/ Reach me a … Fancy, come faster— Hopkins is momentarily speechless in trying to convey the instress8 of the moment, which is a culmination of his struggling with the concept of God’s duality: the Master,/ Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head:/ He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her. Her right heart and single eye were able to read the shock night and know the who and the why, as unwavering as Simon Peter9, the rock of the Catholic Church, as impregnable as the Tarpeian Rock10 of ancient Rome–as opposed to the shifting sands of the shoals–but also a blown beacon of light, like a lighthouse amid the shoals, guiding the others to strength and illumination.
Stanza 30 alludes to the day after the shipwreck, December 8th, in Catholicism the Feast [Solemnity] of the Immaculate Conception, celebrating the belief that the Virgin Mary was preserved free from original sin from the very moment of her conception, as, then, was Jesus. In this case, Jesus’s glory (somewhat suggestive) of the nun resulted in a heart-throe and the birth of a brain,/ Word, that uttered Jesus’s name outright, in prayer: “O Christ, Christ, come quickly.”
Stanza 31. But pity of the rest of them! Hopkins’ heart bleeds for the remainder of the souls who have died Comfortless and unconfessed and thus denied salvation. However, he abruptly corrects himself: No not uncomforted. the tall nun (Maiden) in her heart (breast) so glorified Christ’s all-encompassing, protective, and merciful lovely-felicitous Providence that she became Providential herself, a bellwether (to be a bell to, ring of it) to Startle the poor sheep back to Christ. In this way, Hopkins finally resolves the recurrent concept of duality: the tempest and shipwrack, the suffering and deaths of those on the Deutschland , were the means by which Christ gathered (harvest) their souls (grain) to His compassionate heart.
(Stanza 31 is interesting, to say the least, to examine for its rhyme, which displays how far Hopkins stretches the English language. Lines 1, 3, and 8 use mosaic rhyme 11with pain for the, vein for the, and grain for thee. Lines 2, 4, and 6 use a combination of mosaic and rove-over rhyme12 with rest of them, [uncon]fessed of them, and breast of the/M[aiden]. Lines 5 and 7 rhyme–barely and most outrageously, perhaps–with [Pro]vidence and [o]f it and S[tartle]. Imagine trying to emulate Hopkins? The poem is replete with poetic figures and devices, far beyond the purview of this analysis.)
Stanzas 32 and 33 assert the extent of Christ’s Providence–tides, flood, year’s fall, gulfs, ocean, as well as ground of being, and granite of it–culminating in the profound mandate of four stressed syllables: past all/Grasp God. Beyond everything, instress (Grasp) God’s essence/inscape (Grasp God).
A Providence that in its mercy overcomes (outrides) The all of water (even shoals); provides a safe ark/For the listener and the lingerer; even a vein for those past prayer or pent in prison, or those who are only penitent on their death-bed (last-breath), the final (uttermost) moment (mark) of life. The Providence of our passion-plunged Christ (giant) risen, The Christ of the Father compassionate, grasped (fetched) in the strength (storm) of His power (strides).
Stanza 34 is a paean to Christ, born again (new born) to the world through the nuns’ sacrifice, double-natured as man and God, born the Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame, the second (Mid-numbered he in three) entity of the Holy Trinity. His coming into man’s hearts in this extreme moment of storm not a dooms-day dazzle or a ligntning of fire hard-hurled, but Kind, A released shower, in which, resolving the paradox of duality, through His mercy, in taking the nuns’ lives, in their salvation, royally reclaiming his own.
Stanza 35. Hopkins concludes the poem with a plea (Remember us) to the tall nun (Dame), Drowned and her body now part of England (among our shoals–her body was never recovered), but her soul in heaven ( the heaven-haven of the Reward) to plea to Christ (Our King) to right the wrong of Protestantism and return the true light of Catholicism to England: to easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east, illuminating, re-enlightening , and brightening her, rare-dear Britain. Our King, the Pride, rose, prince, and hero of us, high-priest–the fire of the hearth of our hearts‘ limitless love (charity), the Lord of our spiritually thronged thoughts‘ loyalty and devotion (chivalry):
Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.
In Hopkins’ poem, The Windhover, he marvels at a falcon in flight: the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! In the hundred-plus years since Wreck of the Deutschland was published, readers and critics have been in awe of Hopkins’ achieve of and mastery of poetry, the English language, and the tragedy of the Deutschland, this “monumental work” and “masterpiece.” How, to use Hopkins’ terms and words, he can so completely illuminate the “the dynamic, unifying energy” (instress) of the tragedy to perfectly convey its “unique identity, distinctive essence” (inscape). It is, indeed, a marvel.
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- a shallow place in a body of water, a sandbank or sandbar near the surface ↩︎
- F. R. Leavis (1932) ↩︎
- A poetic fulcrum (also called a volta or turn) is the pivotal moment in a poem where the tone, logic, or imagery shifts dramatically. ↩︎
- The unique, inner essence or spiritual identity of an object, person, or landscape. ↩︎
- A 13th-century German Benedictine nun, theologian, and intellectual powerhouse. She is the only female saint in history to hold the title “The Great.” She is famous for her deep, supernatural visions of Jesus and is credited as one of the earliest champions of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. ↩︎
- A 16th-century German monk, theologian, and composer who started the Protestant Reformation. He is most famous for nailing his 95 Theses to a church door in 1517, directly challenging the Catholic Church’s practice of selling indulgences (certificates that promised to reduce punishment for sins). ↩︎
- A 13th-century Italian friar who founded the Franciscan religious order. He is widely recognized for his radical commitment to poverty, humility, and his deep spiritual connection to nature and animals. He is also the first recorded person to receive the five wounds of Christ on his body. ↩︎
- The internal energy or divine force that sustains an object’s unique essence (inscape) and transmits it to the observer. ↩︎
- Simon Peter, also known simply as Saint Peter, was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ and the foundational leader of the early Christian Church. Originally a Galilean fisherman named Simon, he was renamed “Petros” (Greek) by Jesus, both meaning “rock”. This name signified his role as the rock upon which Jesus would build his church. ↩︎
- A steep, 80-foot cliff on the south side of the Capitoline Hill in ancient Rome. Historically, it was used as a notorious execution site from which murderers, traitors, and perjurers were flung to their deaths. It was celebrated as Rome’s unshakeable, “impregnable” citadel ↩︎
- A type of multisyllabic rhyme where a single, multi-syllable word is rhymed with a phrase made up of two or more smaller words ↩︎
- A poetic technique where a metrical foot is left incomplete at the end of one line and is only completed by borrowing the first letter or syllable from the very beginning of the next line ↩︎
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