Chapter 30 - Ode

Summary

This chapter explores Gerard Manley Hopkins’s relationship to the tradition of the ode, most especially in his poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. It traces Hopkins’s scholarly interest in the odes of antiquity, particularly those of Pindar, and examines how this engagement with the classical tradition shaped ‘The Wreck’. ‘The Wreck’ is then contextualized within Romantic and Victorian approaches to the ode through comparisons with major odes by John Milton, William Wordsworth, and Lord Alfred Tennyson. Hopkins’s engagement with the ode embodies a Romantic concern with personal feeling but shares his fellow Victorians’ concern with the ode as a poem of public occasion while retaining the explicitly Christian orientation that animated Milton’s use of the form. The chapter closes with a brief consideration of Hopkins’s unrealized plans to write an ode on the life of the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion.