Stonyhurst was a very important place for the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It nurtured his love of nature and the natural world, and gave him time to explore the countryside around the College. His time at Stonyhurst was also a difficult time for him, with bouts of depression and a struggle with his teaching load, and whilst he wrote a small amount of poetry during these years, it is clear that the College and the surrounding countryside had an impact on his later poetry and his original ideas of inscape and instress. Inscape is Hopkins' term or the distinctive essence of a thing and instress is the force of energy that holds the inscape together. This excerpt from the poem As Kingfishers Catch Fire is an excellent example of inscape and instress:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself; myself it speaks and spells.
The landscape of the area around Stonyhurst College clearly influenced Hopkins' poetic imagination, and his journals are filled with meticulous observations of flowers, waves, bluebells and other features of the Lancashire landscape.
He also wrote poetic descriptions of the peculiar sunsets he saw there: "A bright sunset lines the clouds so that their brims look like gold, brass, bronze, or steel. It fetches out those dazzling flecks and spangles which people call fish-scales. It gives to a mackerel or dappled cloudrack the appearance of quilted crimson silk, or a ploughed field glazed with crimson ice."
It wasn’t just the sun which caught Hopkins' attention. He would find beauty — “the grandeur of God” — in all manner of places, some of them fairly unlikely. Stories abound of his eccentric behaviour at Stonyhurst, such as the time when he hung over a frozen pond to observe bubbles trapped beneath the ice or was seen staring at the gravel outside St Mary’s Hall!
The journals he kept during his years at Stonyhurst College demonstrate his naturalist vision and his sense of "thisness". Hopkins wrote "I saw the sun set behind Pendle Hill: the black hill stood against the red sky like a fallen beast".
I was so delighted to explore Stonyhurst and imagine Gerard Manley Hopkins developing and crafting his poetic vision in this loveliest of settings.