June 30. Thunderstorms all day, great claps and lightning running up and down. When it was bright between times great towering clouds behind which the sun put out his shaded horns very clearly and a longish way. Level curds and whey sky after sunset. – Graceful growth of Etzkoltzias or however those unhappy flowers are spelt. Yews and evergreen trees now very thin and putting out their young pale shoots.
July 17.… It was this night I believe but possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England, but resolved to say nothing to anyone till three months are over, that is the end of the Long, and then of course to take no step till after my Degree.
July 19.… Alone in the woods … I have now found the law of the oak leaves.…
“Found the law of the oak leaves”? At the heart of Hopkins’s lifelong and consistent poetic reside the concepts of inscape and instress, thus named by Hopkins when he was an undergraduate. By “inscape” Hopkins means pattern in nature, and by “nature” he means not only oak leaves in the woods and clouds in the summer, but the more general reality of the universe, of “the way things are.” For Hopkins, inscape results from divinely intelligent creation. Catherine Phillips, one editor of Hopkins’s collected works, explains his idea of instress this way: “Unlike ‘inscape,’ which is the result of mental analysis and perception, ‘instress’ is more nebulous, often, although not always, associated with feeling; it is the identifying impression a thing can communicate to a careful and receptive observer. Hopkins also uses the term to mean ‘the stress within,’ the force which binds something or a person into a unit.”13 Those of us who have the eyes to see and the will to know can instress an inscape by not just “taking” it in, but by “stressing” it in. “The law of the oak leaves” is their inscape; Hopkins “found” that law on July 19, 1866, and instressed it.
1868
May 2. Fine, with some haze, and warm. This day, I think, I resolved.
May 5. Cold. Resolved to be a religious.
May 6. Fine but rather thick and with a very cold N.E. wind.
May 7. Warm; misty morning; then beautiful turquoise sky. Home, after having decided to be a priest and religious but still doubtful between St. Benedict and St. Ignatius.…
May 11. Dull; afternoon fine. Slaughter of the innocents. See above, the 2nd.
July 11.… How fond of and warped to the mountains it wd. be easy to become! For every cliff and limb and edge and jutty has its own nobility. – Two boys came down the mountain yodeling. [Hopkins is visiting Switzerland.] – We saw the snow in the hollows for the first time. In one the surface was crisped across the direction of the cleft and the other way, that is across the broader crisping and down the stream, combed: the stream ran below and smoke came fr. the hollow: the edge of the snow hewn in curves as if by moulding planes. – Crowd of mountain flowers – gentians; gentianellas; blood-red lucerne; a deep blue glossy spiked flower like plantain, flowering gradually up the spike, so that at the top it looks like clover or honeysuckle; rich big harebells glistening black like the cases of our veins when dry and heated fr. without; and others. All the herbage enthronged with every fingered or fretted leaf. – Firs very tall, with the swell of the branching on the outer side of the slope so that the peaks seem to point inwards to the mountain peak, like the lines of the Parthenon, and the outline melodious and moving on many focuses. – I wore my pagharee and turned it with harebells below and gentians in two rows above like double pan-pipes. – In coming down we lost our way and each had a dangerous slide down the long wet grass of a steep slope.
1870
February. One day in the Long Retreat (which ended on Xmas Day) they were reading in the refectory Sister Emmerich’s account of the Agony in the Garden and I suddenly began to cry and sob and could not stop. I put it down for this reason, that if I had been asked a minute beforehand I should have said that nothing of the sort was going to happen and even when it did I stood in a manner wondering at myself not seeing in my reason the traces of an adequate cause for such strong emotion – the traces of it I say because of course the cause in itself is adequate for the sorrow of a lifetime. I remember much the same thing on Maundy Thursday when the presanctified Host was carried to the sacristy. But neither the weight nor the stress of sorrow, that is to say of the thing which should cause sorrow, by themselves move us or bring the tears as a sharp knife does not cut for being pressed as long as it is pressed without any shaking of the hand but there is always one touch, something striking sideways and unlooked for, which in both cases undoes resistance and pierces, and this may be so delicate that the pathos seems to have gone directly to the body and cleared the understanding in its passage.
March 12. A fine sunset: … The next morning a heavy fall of snow. It tufted and toed the firs and yews and went on to load them till they were taxed beyond their spring. The limes, elms, and Turkey-oaks it crisped beautifully as with young leaf. Looking at the elms from underneath you saw every wave in every twig (become by this the wire-like stem to a finger of snow) and to the hangers and flying sprays it restored, to the eye, the inscapes they had lost. They were beautifully brought out against the sky, which was on one side dead blue, on the other washed with gold.
September 24. First saw the Northern Lights.… This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgment was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear.
1871
End of March and beginning of April. – This is the time to study inscape in the spraying of trees, for the swelling buds carry them to a pitch which the eye could not else gather – for out of much much more, out of little not much, out of nothing nothing: in these sprays at all events there is a new world of inscape. The male ashes are very boldly jotted with the heads of the bloom which tuft the outer ends of the branches. The staff of each of these branches is closely knotted with the places where buds are or have been, so that it is something like a finger which has been tied up with string and keeps the marks. They are in knops of a pair, one on each side and the knops are set alternately, at crosses with the knops above and the knops below, the bud of course is a short smoke-black pointed nail-head or beak pieced of four lids or nippers. Below it, like hollow below the eye or the piece between the knuckle and the root of the nail, is a half-moon-shaped sill as if once chipped the wood and this gives the twig its quaining.…
April 22. But such a lovely damasking in the sky as today I never felt before. The blue was charged with same instress, the higher, zenith sky earnest and frowning, lower more light and sweet. High up again, breathing through woolly coats of cloud or on the quains and branches of the flying pieces it was the true exchange of crimson.…
May 9. This day and May 11 the bluebells in the little wood between the College and the highroad and in one of the Hurst Green cloughs. In the little wood / opposite the light / they stood in blackish spreads or sheddings like the spots on a snake. The heads are then like thongs and solemn in grain and grape-colour. But in the clough / through the light / they came in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground