[R. S. Gwynn]

I just finished the third of Anthony Burgess's Enderby (an erratic poet) novels, Enderby's End, or The Clockwork Testament, which deals, in an offhand way, with the reaction to Kubrick's film. Here the plot centers on Enderby's screenplay to Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," which is about the loss of a passenger ship off the English coast; among those lost were five German nuns seeking asylum in the UK. I must admit that I'd started the poem many times but had never finished it; it is very difficult and one would say proto-modern. Well, I have read it now. You might give it a try yourself.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...he-deutschland

[John Riley]

My first introduction to Hopkins was an article that focused on his meter. The article was enthusiastic about the meter he designed. How radical was the change? Do today’s formal poets consider his work to be metrical? Is there debate?

[Rose Novick]

Hopkins' poetry is definitely metrical; the only reason to consider it non-metrical is inability to master it. (Its formal properties are reasonably well-studied, by the sorts of folks who study such things, though also controversial, because formal study of scansion is the domain of cranks. I say this with all love, and definite sympathy.)

Sprung rhythm is best understood as bringing back features of Old English alliterative verse into accentual-syllabic meter, only counting strong stresses and allowing more unstressed syllables between them than would otherwise be allowed. To differentiate strong stresses from "stressed" syllables too weak to count he too uses alliterative techniques, as well as internal rhyme and other ways to draw extra emphasis to them.

It's not identical to alliterative meter: it still makes some concessions to accentual-syllabic meter and will fall back into it at times. But if you take the time to get a feel for it, you can hear his meter when reading his poems aloud, and it is palpably different from yr friendly neighborhood iambs.

[Ann Drysdale]

Oh, the reading-aloud of it makes meaning shine.

See also "Cynghanedd", which will have influenced his ear during the learning of Welsh.
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[Carl Copeland]

A riveting reading, spoiled only by the grotesque animation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rck5mtuceEk

[R. S. Gwynn]

A lot has been made of "sprung rhythm," which can best be heard in "The Windhover." In his letters to Bridges he perhaps over-explains his practice by using extrapolations from traditional metrical terms. That said, a good deal of Hopkins's poetry is written in traditional meters. This one is accentual (or "sprung") with lines ranging from 3 to 6 stresses. I can't be quite sure if the pattern is exactly maintained in each stanza.