I was delighted by Joseph J. Feeney’s account of the developing sensitivity within the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Immortal diamond cut from faith”, 7 June). Dr Feeney might like to know that in one of the busiest pubs in Hopkins’ home town, Stratford, east London, a pleasing selection of framed poems by him has for a long while added to the place’s congenial atmosphere. Just why his Scotist theory of inscape took shape as poetry will always be mysterious, but it was evidently an alternative to stiff Puseyite ritualism. Hopkins’ first encounter with Scotus, at the age of 28, must have sowed seeds of his celebratory sprung rhythm. But three years later, an event in his native Stratford added to its potential profundity. After the death by drowning