The Wreck of the Deutschland

The original manuscript of The Wreck of the Deutschland has been lost. The copies that remain today, referred to as texts A (c. 1878) and B (1883), are copies made by Robert Bridges with additions and corrections by Hopkins himself. These manuscripts are currently at the Bridges Loan Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and have not been digitized. Copies exist in facsimile (The Later Poetic Manuscripts of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Facsimile. Ed. Norman H. MacKenzie. London: Garland Publishing, 1991).

As can be appreciated in the manuscripts, Robert Bridges took a few editorial liberties upon transcribing the poems. The most notorious of these are his removal of Hopkins’ stresses and other diacritical marks which are, according to Hopkins, fundamental in comprehending correctly what he is trying to accomplish with his use of sprung rhythm (see Meter & Rhythm). Fundamental or not, the fact remains that, by removing these diacritical marks from the text of the 1918 edition, Hopkins’ poems have been published for decades without these essential markings. 

Below you can find the text of the 1918 publication of The Wreck of the Deutschland, as well as a version, based on text B, which includes Hopkins’ original diacritical marks.

There are also several online editions of The Wreck of the Deutschland freely available to the public. Some, like the one from the Poetry Foundation, alter completely the appearance of the text by removing not only most of the punctuation marks, but also the indentation of the lines. Other sites, like Bartleby do an excellent job of providing a text which, although still missing most of these markings, has been annotated to account for the changes and additions throughout time.