“Lovescape crucified”: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s red letter and “The Wreck of the Deutschland”

This essay investigates whether Gerard Manley Hopkins’s famous ‘red letter’ of 1871 might open the way to a new reading of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, and whether the Paris Commune thus offered up to Hopkins an analogical prototype of the ‘Lovescape crucified’ that he would elaborate more fully in his poetic meditation on the death by drowning of five Franciscan nuns four years later. It considers Hopkins’s response to the revolutionary event of the Commune, his correspondence with Robert Bridges on this topic, and the extent to which ‘The Wreck’ both represses and resurrects Hopkins’s unexpected moment of revolutionary enthusiasm.