Which English poet wrote the ode 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'?

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote the ode “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” He composed it in 1875 and 1876 after the SS Deutschland ran aground in a severe storm in December 1875, causing many deaths in the Thames estuary.

Among those who died were five Franciscan nuns who had been forced to leave Germany under the Falk Laws, anticlerical legislation associated with the Kulturkampf. Their deaths moved Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, and inspired the poem’s intense meditation on faith, suffering, divine judgment, and human mortality.

The poem contains 35 stanzas and was not published during Hopkins’s lifetime. It eventually appeared in 1918, decades after his death, helping introduce readers to his highly individual poetic technique. Hopkins uses sprung rhythm, compressed syntax, unusual word formation, and dense sound patterns to create a turbulent verbal equivalent of the storm and the poem’s spiritual struggle.

A common mix-up is to identify John Henry Newman, another prominent Catholic writer, because of the poem’s religious subject matter. Newman did not write “The Wreck of the Deutschland”; the ode is one of Hopkins’s most important and ambitious works.