“Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.” This is one of the closing lines to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” I was reminded of this poem last year in light of the tragedy in the Yellow Sea in South Korea. The Sewol ferry, heading to a popular holiday island, capsized while carrying 476 people around this time last year, killing 304 people. Most of the 172 survivors were rescued by local fishing boats and other commercial vessels that beat the South Korean coast guard to the scene by half an hour. Many of the passengers were students and teachers from a high school near Seoul on a field trip. Dozens of divers searched in vain in the frigid, murky waters, holding on to the hope that they might find someone still alive inside the sunken ferry.
Hopkins’ poem was written in 1918 in memory of another ship that sank. That emigrant ship, the Deutschland, had set out from Germany for New York but ran aground on a shoal 25 miles off the coast of England in a snowstorm on December 6, 1875. Waves crushed the ship and no one answered the signals for help until much later. Ultimately, it was a lazy rescue effort, and some even descended upon the scene merely for personal gain, taking anything of value off the dead bodies.
