Since I first wrote an Elizabethan sonnet in high school English class, dutifully filling the template with unstressed-stressed pairs, 14 ten-syllable lines, and an ABAB rhyme scheme (until the end?), I had held in my mind a question with far-reaching ramifications: “Why?” Why should I as a poet use this or that rhyme scheme, this or that meter, this or that number of feet, this or that number of lines? What was the reason behind the forms and the structures of our tradition, venerable as I held it to be? I knew deeply that I would have to answer if I were ever going to be a serious poet. Finding “The Wreck of the Deutschland” was my first great step to finding that answer.

When I first began to read Hopkins, I made my slow and leisurely way through some of his early poems, which are beautiful, somewhat sedate, and often piously benign. It took me years (what now seems like a comical amount of time) to seriously read what are known as his “mature” poems. “The Wreck of the Deutschland” is the first of these poems: it is Hopkins’ return debut after his converting to Catholicism, entering the Jesuits, and spending seven years of his formation in a self-imposed and obedience-reinforced abstinence from writing poetry.

There is nothing sedate or piously benign about it.

In “The Wreck,” Hopkins re-pioneers sprung verse in modern English, drawing upon the alliterative verse tradition of Anglo-Saxon. This monumental decision gives the poem its stormwave-crashing energy: instead of regular feet made of a consistent number of syllables, Hopkins uses a varied foot ranging from 1-4 syllables, always with one stress, or pulse. He sets this within a stanza structure derived from a Greek Ode: 2-3-4-3-5-5-4-6 pulses in a line, with an ABABCBCA rhyme scheme. Gah! I just can’t get enough of this form. The first four shortened lines give immense emphasis and weight to every word, which sets the tone and context for the four latter, longer lines which then broaden (and sometimes explode!) into a more flowing discourse. The rhyme scheme ties this effect together, setting a dense pattern in the first four lines and breaking away in the last four lines with a final striking return. This setting for sprung verse gives it a brooding, boiling, roiling energy that builds and builds, breaks, then suddenly returns, like (among other things) waves upon a ship. In short, every structural choice about this poem was perfectly suited to its subject. Here was a man who had asked the very questions I had asked about poetry, the “why” of the tradition, and had formed his own response.

We haven’t even touched on what moved Hopkins to write: how in a ship wrecked at sea, Hopkins sees his own soul, wracked and loved by the mastering God; the grief of death and the horror of pain; the ecstasy of beauty and the impossible wonder of mercy; how all these things are held together in requiescent tension in the mastering and merciful God; how Hopkins lifts up all at last to that God’s praise and adoration, the purpose for my ever having been made.

I could scarcely believe that I had found such a resonant and thundrous response to my query, which I realized was for more than simply the reasons of the poetry that so captured me; it was a desire for a father in it. Thus has Hopkins become for me - a gift from his Father and mine.