Sitting just outside Stratford library is a memorial stone for a man classed as one of England’s greatest poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Hopkins was born in Stratford on the 28th July 1844 and lived at 87 The Grove for the first ten years of his life. The family were prosperous, well educated, deeply religious and attended their local house of worship, St John’s Church.

Hopkins’ father moved the family to Hampstead in 1852 and Gerard was sent to Highgate School as a boarding student. It was here that he started to write poetry. Gerard continued to write poems until 1867, when he decided to dedicate himself to training in order to become a Roman Catholic priest -an act that would see his Anglican family distance themselves from him permanently.

Gerard made a vow never to write poems again, unless by order of his superiors. In fact, he burnt all his poetry in a self-made bonfire!

It took eight years, a shipwreck and the loss of 157 lives (including those of five Franciscan nuns) before his superior asked him to write a poem to commemorate the tragic SS Deutschland- the ship had run aground in the Thames estuary during a storm on 6th December 1875. Hopkins’ poem The Wreck of the Deutschland touched many hearts while confusing many minds because it did not follow the standard poetic form of English poetry for that time. During Hopkins’ years of writing, he had developed a style of his own which he called Spring Rhythm.

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