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
Narrated by Denis Daly
If Kafka is the ultimate literary representative of alienation, Gerard Manley Hopkins could be said to represent the acme of personal disaffection. Oppressed by a sense of the futility of his own intellectual brilliance and suffering the torments of suppression of his latent homosexuality, Hopkins sought redemption rather than satisfaction. The agonies of diurnal existence, he believed, could be endured by the expectation of eternal bliss after death - if he met the rigorous moral standards of his unseen and silent creator. Hopkins retreated to the Middle Ages for his theology, which he regarded as the science of salvation. However, in his poetic constructions he pushed language to new extremes and opened the way for avant garde Twentieth Century writers like Pound and Joyce.
The Wreck of the Deutschland, considered by many to be Hopkins' masterpiece, was written in 1875/76 but not published until 1918. It describes the shipwreck of the SS Deutschland, which ran aground on a sandbar off the coast of Kent during a storm in December 1875. Among the casualties were five Franciscan nuns, who had been expelled from Germany under the anti-clerical Falk Laws and who were travelling to settle in a convent in Wheaton, Illinois. In searing tones, Hopkins describes the panic and death agonies of the nuns, and attempts to find meaning in this tragic event by the contemplation of the brides of Christ being joyfully united with their lord. Hopkins appears to have been completely of the conviction that the beginning of wisdom is the Fear of the Lord, and the work ends, as do so many of his shorter poems, with a baleful admonition to render praise to God.
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