the stigma of meter 61
Acute Stress in “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
In October 1878, Hopkins wrote a clear definition of sprung rhythm for his
colleague, former teacher and admirer Reverend Richard Watson Dixon, in
which he bemoaned the necessity of marking metrical stress with blue chalk:
[Sprung rhythm] consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, with-
out any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one
strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong. . . . I do not
say the idea is altogether new; there are hints of it in music, in nurs-
ery rhymes and popular jingles, and in the poets themselves, and, since
then, I have seen it talked about as a thing possible in critics . . . to me
it appears, I own, to be a better and more natural principle than the or-
dinary system, much more flexible, and capable of greater effects. How-
ever I had to mark the stresses in blue chalk, and this and my rhymes
carried on from one line to another and certain chimes suggested by
the Welsh poetry I had been reading (what they call cynghanedd) and a
great many more oddnesses could not but dismay an editor’s eye, so that
when I offered it to our magazine The Month, though at first they ac-
cepted it, after a time they withdrew and dared not to print it.^38The offended eye is to blame for “The Wreck”’s eventual rejection—a reaction
that Hopkins tried to prevent when he sent the poem to Bridges.^39 He instructs
Bridges in May 1878 to “not slovenly read it with the eyes but with the ears, as
if the paper were declaiming it at you.”^40 With blue chalk marks, the “eye” is
dismayed at the patterns of the verse, held under the yoke of a visible rhythm.
Without diacritical marks, the unmarked poem is “quite a different thing.
Stress is the life of it,” but only if it is read aloud properly. The power of the
visual mark to hold the reader’s eye and, at the same time, dismay is part of the
instress of that blue chalk line. Hopkins, too, is at once fascinated and frus-
trated by this perceived power.
Both thematically and metrically, wavering between that which is heard
and that which is visually perceived but not heard, serves as another level of
narrative in the poem. The poem’s story details the shipwreck of “The Deutsch-
land,” as derived from newspaper reports.^41 The epigraph reads: “to the happy
memory of the five Franciscan nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between
midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875.” The first stanzas of the poem (st.
1–10), which comprise “part the first,” are a meditation on emotional stress
and what it means for God and man. The second part of the poem moves from
narration of the events on “The Deutschland” (st. 11–21) to a series of ques-
tions about language, measure, marking, words, hearing, seeing, and finally
concludes with the possibilities of belief—that is, imagining the salvation of
England through God’s grace. Though the poem is too long to discuss in its