ABSTRACT
New York, sank in a storm off Harwich with the loss of over sixty lives. We
know the aftermath of the event. Hopkins was moved by newspaper reports of the disaster, and particularly affected by the fate of five Franciscan nuns sailing into exile from their native land. His religious superior expressed a wish that
someone might write a poem about the shipwreck. Accordingly, Hopkins
returned to poetry, breaking the scrupulous silence which he had observed
since joining the Jesuit order some seven years earlier. Everyone who reads Hopkins has to encounter 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', that magnificent,
daunting poem, still dazzlingly difficult after a hundred years. Robert Bridges
called it the 'dragon at the gate' of Hopkins's poetry, and with the growth of
Hopkins's reputation there has been no lack of would-be dragon-slayers in the
form of critics and commentators. 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' has been extensively written about and I shall not add to the discussion on this occasion;
except, merely, to draw attention to a feature of the dragon's tail. In the last
stanza of the poem Hopkins invokes for a final time the drowned nun whose death he has already described. And then the poem ends with a positive, sonorous, unexpected conclusion: a call to Christ to return to England, or, in
less dramatic terms, for the return of England to the traditional Catholic faith:
The aspiration itself was not at all surprising. At that time, less than a generation after the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the
Conversion of England still seemed not merely desirable, but, if God willed it, feasible. And if it is an unexpected note on which to conclude a poem about a shipwreck, we realise, by the time we have got to the end of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', that it is about a great many more things than a shipwreck. Yet if
a fervent desire to see England Catholic again might be no more than one would expect of a young English Jesuit in the mid-1970s, Hopkins's expression
of the theme had a characteristically personal fervour.
