Where, Where Was a, Where Was a Place?

Gerard Manley Hopkins destroyed much of his own juvenilia, we lack in his case the kind of early touchstone afforded by Keats's 'Imitation of Spenser' and Hallam Tennyson's 'Timbuctoo'. The public and private crises featured in 'The Wreck' teach Gerard Manley Hopkins to find place in things, an inversion of the traditional logic by which things occupy place. 'All words mean either things or relations of things', Hopkins had written in 1868, 'For the word is the expression, uttering of the idea in the mind. In the aforementioned 1868 essay, Hopkins describes the effects of literary art in terms that highlight its capacity to enclose the reader. 'The mind", he writes, 'is absorbed, taken up by, dwells upon, enjoys, a single thought; one call it contemplation. Art extracts the energy of contemplation'. A thing to weather indeed, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' represents the first emanation in the century's final incarnation of luscious form.