Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Catholic Death

In the writings of the Victorian poet and priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, a persistent fascination with death can be identified. In ‘The Escorial’, the very first poem we have from him, the fifteen-year-old schoolboy treats of the gory death of a saint that inspired the design of a Spanish royal palace. At St Beuno’s in Wales, during his studies of theology, news of the death by shipwreck of five German nuns caused Hopkins to end a long poetic silence and compose his perhaps most elaborate poem, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’.