"Wreck" the Halls With British Poetry

A couple of days late and dollars short...but I am linking, for the good reader's meditative reading, the ode Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.  When Hopkins was a seminarian he overheard the seminary rector suggest that someone write a poem about that recent tragedy; this Hopkins did, dedicating the work "to the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles of the Falk Laws drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7. 1875."

Hopkins' poem was ahead of its time, with its peculiar coinage of words and phraseology.  It was also his return from a self-imposed exile from writing poetry.  I have found in this and many other poems of Hopkins a challenge and a delight, a mirror and a window.