Storm at sea: the voyage between imagination and truth

Abstract

In 1875 Gerard Manley Hopkins, then a Jesuit novice, wrote his poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland'. It is dedicated to five nuns who died as a consequence of a storm at sea. The poet had no direct experience of the event yet the poem is an intensely personal one, combining narrative about an actual maritime disaster, which he knew from newspaper reports, with revelations about his spiritual struggle and beliefs. My reading of Hopkins' poem prompted curiosity about how the facts of storm at sea may be shaped into fiction, and what truths are revealed in that process. The resulting thesis looks at the poem and five other texts in which storm at sea is a crucial event. My focus on an event, storm at sea, rather than an author or era did not do much to narrow the possibilities of text selection. It is a universal and ancient narrative theme, widely used in tales of adventure and exploration, often serving as a transition device. It can be a natural or a magical event, or an expression of divine will. It is the subject of poems, plays, books, and stories and seems infinitely adaptable to authorial style and purpose. A great range of work was available to me, including The Odyssey, The Tempest, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Gulliver's Travels, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', and 'The Wreck of the Hesperus'. 'Truth' became the guiding principle: all the texts under discussion are either based on actual events or use storm as a means of exploring the notion of truth, some do both.