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The Wreck of The Deutschland: A New Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Elisabeth W. Schneider
Elisabeth W. Schneider*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

For a long time, the luxuriance of baroque imagery so conspicuous in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins has tended to obscure one of its fundamental characteristics. His is a poetry of statement, intellectually formulated even when at emotional white heat, and scarcely at all, in any usual sense, poetry of suggestion or atmosphere. He could not have permitted himself to write otherwise even if he had wished, and he did not wish. Though obviously the poetry does not lie in the statement—he himself was explicit about this—still, when he found that even Robert Bridges had continual difficulty in making out his literal meaning, he resolved, he said, “to prefix short prose arguments” to some of his work. “These too,” he added, “will expose me to carping, but I do not mind.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , March 1966 , pp. 110 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (London, 1959), p. 289.

2 The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London, 1935), p. 265, hereafter referred to as Letters, i. The Correspondence of ... Hopkins and ... Dixon (London, 1935) will be referred as to Letters, ii; Further Letters of ... Hopkins (second ed., London, 1956) as Letters, iii.

3 This must be the essential parallel upon which the poem is founded and not, as some writers have suggested, one between the poet's experience and that of a nun drowned in the disaster, for the latter resemblance is too slightly sketched and embraces too little of the poem to be more than incidental; taken as a structural theme it leaves out most of the poem. For an instance of that view, however, see Robert R. Boyle's discussion of the poem in Immortal Diamond, ed. Norman Weyand (New York, 1949), especially pp. 335, 339.

4 Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner, 3rd ed., revised (London, 1960), p. 109.

5 The Times, Monday, 13 Dec. 1875 (editorial). This and extracts from the news accounts in the Times are reprinted in Immortal Diamond, pp. 354–374. See also Letters, iii, 439–443.

6 See my article “Sprung Rhythm: A Chapter in the Evolution of Nineteenth-Century Verse,” PMLA, lxxx (June 1965), 237–253.

7 I read the line without a stress on me—“Thóu mástering-me / Gód” (differing in this from Gardner, Poems, p. 221)—taking mastering me as a single proclitic epithet of God, the equivalent of masterful or overmastering, made personal for the sake of the theme of Part i.

8 The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Christopher Devlin (London, 1959), pp. 175, 195 (hereafter referred to as Devotional Writings).

9 F. R. Leavis (New Bearings in English Poetry, London, 1942, pp. 179–180), mistakenly, I think, sees the two images in this much-discussed stanza as symbolizing two successive and contrasting experiences. John E. Keating also reads it differently, finding “ironic humor” in the image of the steady water (The Wreck of the Deutschland: An Essay and Commentary, Research Ser. vi, Kent State Univ., Kent, Ohio, 1963, pp. 50–61). Still another interpretation is offered by Gardner (Poems, p. 222) and a fuller version of my own in MLN, lxv (1950), 306–311.

10 One might not hazard this reading if the poet were any other than Hopkins—but of course no other poet would have written the line, whatever the meaning. Instressed and stressed in this passage are usually taken to be grammatically parallel, but to read them so seems to me to produce a meaningless tautology as well as a feeble and pointless anticlimax uncharacteristic of Hopkins. By mere assertion John Pick tries to make a virtue of what I can see only as a defect: “The impact,” he says, “is heightened by the reversal of the expected word order” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Priest and Poet, London, 1942, p. 44 n.). Cf. the discussion of this in Gardner's Gerard Manley Hopkins, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1948–49), i, 56–57, and the extended discussion by Boyle (Immortal Diamond, pp. 343–348), which I find equally unsatisfactory. The natural reading seems to me the one I have given, and it is quite in keeping with Hopkins' practice of taking accepted idioms or constructions and stretching them slightly beyond their ordinary use. The employment of a participle as the equivalent of an elliptical clause is common, though it more often precedes than follows the main statement (e.g., “Planted early enough, the seed will sprout in May,” but also, “This will grow indoors, given plenty of sun”). Hopkins used it a number of times elsewhere: “clouds ... / Shew brighter shaken in Pemmaen Pool” (Poems, p. 68, the poem written immediately after the Deutschland), more eccentrically in “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been” (ibid., p. 83) and “nor he for his bones risen” (ibid., p. 75).

It is impracticable here to enter into the general question of Hopkins' use of the word instress. I cannot avoid the suspicion that it meant different things at different times (see the indexes of Letters, I and ii, Journals, and [incomplete] Devotional Writings; also Letters, iii, 446). Most important studies of Hopkins contain discussions of the term. In the present passage, however, the meaning seems plainly the same as in one of his notes of meditation where it is explicitly defined, “This song of Lucifer's was a dwelling on his own beauty, an instressing of his own inscape” (Devotional Writings, pp. 200–201).

11 The Times, 11 and 13 Dec. 1875 (reprinted, with minor differences, in Immortal Diamond, pp. 368, 374).

12 In thought and language this line echoes “Lord of living and dead” in the first stanza.

13 OED, also English Dialect Dictionary; Yeats, introduction to Irish Fairy and Folk Tales.

14 I have given the reading in some detail because the passage is an important link in the thought and has been read quite differently by Gardner in his notes to the poem. He takes mark to be a noun, fetched a verb, so as to read (as I understand him) “The uttermost mark [that] our giant fetched.” This seems to me to have little or no meaning in its context; the sense of “mark” is vague and fetched more than a little slangy as well as wrenched into a wrong tense: present, perfect, or future would be conceivable but not the simple past. There is a verbal parallel to the reading I have suggested in the sentence opening the sestet of The Soldier (Poems, p. 105), written a few months later, “Mark Christ our King,” as well as the thematic parallel in the “last or first ... men go” of Stanza 8.

15 The fact that it is especially English conversion that Hopkins prays for at the close is signified not only by the specific naming of English souls and Britain but also by the indicated metrical stresses. Gardner (i, 284) prints from MS authority the following:

Dáme, at oúr dóor

Drówned, and among oúr shóals,

in which the second oúr, if not the first also, wrenches the natural reading of the line badly, for the sake, evidently, of this special emphasis.

16 Letters, ii, 71–72, and cf. 85–86. The poem Pied Beauty he described as a curtal sonnet; that is, a poem shorter than a standard sonnet but preserving the same interior proportions.

17 Cf., however, George T. Wright's interesting discussion of the persona in Romantic poetry (The Poet in the Poem, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960, pp. 92 ff.). Wright argues that even the Romantic poet's “I” is not his real self and instances particularly such writers as Byron, Whitman, Wilde (but what of Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley?). It is probably quite sound to say that wherever there is aesthetic distancing there is in some sense a “persona”—though this may be extending the sense of a cult word beyond the point of usefulness.