"Thou mastering me, God!" So begins Gerard Manley Hopkins' elaborate meditation on divine power and providence, "The Wreck of the Deutschland." The complex nature of this mastery forms and informs Hopkins' account of the deaths by shipwreck of five exiled German nuns in the mouth of the Thames on 7 December, 1875. More than a mere narrative or eulogy, however, "The Wreck of the Deutschland" stands as a profound (and profoundly ambiguous) treatment of the poet's own relationships to his God and to his art.

The varied metaphors through which Hopkins expresses these relationships come to form an erratic, inter-related web of imagery. Several strands of that web will be examined here -- those dealing with images of melting and forging, of spatial relationships, and, most critically, of the inherent capacity of divine or inspired language to influence the first two symbolic categories. "The Wreck of the Deutschland" defies linear treatment; its imagery follows no true, systematic progression. It is, however, in its very obliquity that the poem finds its strength. Gerard Manley Hopkins manages to suggest the inexpressibility of his faith, even while writing a text which glorifies the tool of divine expression -- the Word of God.