Happy 168th Birthday!

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born July 28, 1844.

His poetry did not become popular until after his death in 1889, but he is now widely recognized as one of the greatest poets of the Victorian era.

His most ambitious poem, and probably my favorite of his body of work, The Wreck of the Deutschland, was not published until 1918:

To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875

Thou mastering me

God! giver of breath and bread;

World’s strand, sway of the sea;

Lord of living and dead;

Thou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh,

And after it almost unmade, what with dread,

Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

Read the rest.

invisibleforeigner