ABSTRACT
Throughout the summer of 1876, Hopkins waited, with fading hopes, for the Month to publish his Wreck of the Deutschland. His anxiety overshadowed the season’s modest literary successes. In July, he contributed three poems, in English, Latin, and Welsh, to an album presented by the Jesuits of St. Beuno’s to Bishop Brown of Shrewsbury on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his consecration.1 The Bishop arrived at St. Beuno’s on Hopkins’s birthday, July 28, and stayed to celebrate the Feast of St. Ignatius on July 31. On the final evening of the visit, Hopkins’s “Silver Jubilee” was performed after dinner by the St. Beuno’s choir. Gerard reported to his father that the poem had been “set effectively by a very musical and very noisy member of the community and was sung as a glee.”2 At the Bishop’s request, Hopkins’s poem was included in a commemorative pamphlet printed by Burns and Oates, Britain’s largest Catholic publishers. “The Silver Jubilee” was the first work Hopkins had published since his conversion and the only Catholic poem he would ever see in print. He would later disparage the poem to Bridges as a “popular” piece “in which I feel myself to come short,” although he conceded that it “hit the mark it aims at without any wrying.”3
