Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland Sara Manlowe College

The first stanza of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland is, in essence, a snapshot of the entire poem in miniature, for its lines encompass the poet’s doubt and fear but end in the promise of rebirth, the promise that God has always been present, and in unmaking there is, too, a making. ‘Thou mastering me / God!’ (1.1-2) is the poem’s very first line, and ‘thou’ – God – is the very first word, creating God as a watching, listening presence throughout the poem, but especially the first stanza. The rhyme scheme pairs this ‘me’ with ‘sea’ (1.3): a small word, a singular ‘me’ against the overwhelming power of the ocean, and ‘giver of breath and bread’ (1.2) with ‘Lord of living and dead’ (1.4) – ‘bread’, something that gives life, with its opposite, ‘dead.’ The rhymes, then, echo this making and unmaking, encompassing the enormity of God’s power but also what the poet is afraid of. The final lines, too, demonstrate this dread and reassurance of God’s presence and power: ‘After it almost unmade, what with dread, / Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? / Over again I feel thy finger and find thee’ (1.6-8). The final word of the stanza is ‘thee’ – God – just as the first word was ‘thou’. Moreover, the final ‘thee’...