The Wreck of the Deutschland is a long poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...

 with Christian themes

Christian poetry

Christian poetry is any poetry that contains Christian teachings, themes, or references. The influence of Christianity on poetry has been great in any area that Christianity has taken hold...

, composed in 1875 and 1876, though not published until 1918. The poem depicts the shipwreck

Shipwreck

A shipwreck is what remains of a ship that has wrecked, either sunk or beached. Whatever the cause, a sunken ship or a wrecked ship is a physical example of the event: this explains why the two concepts are often overlapping in English....

 of the SS Deutschland. Among those killed in the shipwreck were five Franciscan

Franciscan

Most Franciscans are members of Roman Catholic religious orders founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Besides Roman Catholic communities, there are also Old Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, ecumenical and Non-denominational Franciscan communities....

 nuns forced to leave Germany by the Falk Laws

Falk Laws

The May Laws of 1873 were legislative bills enacted during the Kulturkampf that gave responsibility for the training and appointment of clergy to the state, which resulted in the closing of nearly half of the seminaries in Prussia by 1878...

; the poem is dedicated to their memory.

In the 90 years since the poem's publication, it has attracted considerable critical attention, and is often considered Hopkins' masterpiece because of its length, ambition, and use of sprung rhythm

Sprung rhythm

Sprung rhythm is a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables...

 and instress

Inscape

Inscape is a concept derived by Gerard Manley Hopkins from the ideas of the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus.[Hopkins] felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but...

.

Popular culture

• Hopkins's struggles while writing the poem form the basis for the Ron Hansen
  Ron Hansen (novelist)
  Ron Hansen is an American novelist, essayist, and professor.-Biography:Hansen was born in Omaha, Nebraska, attended a Jesuit high school, Creighton Preparatory School and earned a Bachelor's degree in English from Creighton University in Omaha in 1970. Following military service, he earned an M.F.A...
  
   novel Exiles.

• The poem plays a major role in Anthony Burgess
  Anthony Burgess
  John Burgess Wilson  – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
  
  ' third "Enderby" novel, The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End
  The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End
  The Clockwork Testament is a novella by the British author Anthony Burgess. It is the third of Burgess' four Enderby novels and was first published in 1974 by Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Publishers. It is usually subtitled Enderby's End, as it was originally intended to be the last book in the Enderby...
  
  , in which Enderby pitches an idea for a movie adaptation of the poem and produces a script, only to be duly horrified when the resulting movie bears little resemblance to either his script or to Hopkins's poem. It also makes a notable appearance in Muriel Sparks' novella The Girls of Slender Means, recited by the character Joanna, a budding teacher of elocution in WWII London.