The Wreck of the Deutschland
Ten stanzas on the poet's own mastering by God open onto twenty-five on a steamer driven onto a sandbank in the Thames estuary in a December snowstorm, five Franciscan nuns aboard, expelled from Germany by the anti-Catholic laws. One of them, tall and calling out above the water in the dark, is the point the whole ode turns on. Hopkins broke a seven-year poetic silence to write it, hammering out the sprung rhythm he said had long haunted his ear; the Jesuit magazine that asked for it then declined to print it.
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