The Wreck of the Deutschland

The Wreck of the Deutschland was inspired by the Deutschland incident, a naval disaster in which 157 people died, including five Franciscan nuns who had been leaving Germany due to harsh anti-Catholic laws.With his first major poem, Gerard Manley Hopkins began to give voice to his relationship with God, with nature and with truth. Writing for a few close friends, he was able to experiment very personally with language, creating what he termed 'sprung rhyme' -- a dramatic and eccentric idiom in which casual words explode into significance.