Ignatian Inscape and Instress in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” “God’s Grandeur,” “The Starlight Night,” and “The Windhover”: Hopkins’s Movement toward Ignatius by Way of Walter Pater

Abstract

This essay discusses Gerard Manley Hopkin’s notions of inscape and instress, examining their early expressions during Hopkins’s time as a student at and recent alumnus of Balliol College, Oxford, their subsequent development amid Hopkins’s career as a Jesuit novice and priest, and their manifestation in four sonnets composed in 1877. Attention is paid throughout to the likely influence of Hopkins’s Balliol tutor, Walter Pater, as well as the influence of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises upon Hopkins’s presentation of inscape and instress in his poems.