Poems

This selection gathers the poems Hopkins wrote as a Jesuit in the later nineteenth century, most of them unpublished in his lifetime. Nature sonnets praise kingfishers, a windhover, pied things, and Welsh and Scottish landscapes through sprung rhythm and packed alliteration. The long ode The Wreck of the Deutschland commemorates nuns drowned in a shipwreck. Later 'terrible sonnets' address spiritual drought, self-loathing, and a God who seems absent. Recurring concerns are inscape, sacrifice, and the strain between priestly duty and the making of verse. The book is a body of lyrics and one narrative ode, not a journal and not his sermons.

Quarter bound in purple leather, pale blue cloth boards. Endleaves patterned in purple. Pale blue slipcase.