ABSTRACT
Another latecomer to the Tractarian ethos, Digby Mackworth Dolben moved more rapidly toward Roman Catholicism than any other of Hopkins' acquaintances. His surviving poetry displays an interest in many of the same ideas that Hopkins' early poetry dealt with, to the extent, as Sulloway describes it, that 'to read the poems themselves, is to feel that one is confronting the mind and heart of Gerard Manley Hopkins in another man's skin:'l As weIl as exhibiting an intensely incarnational approach to his understanding of the relationship between hirnself and God, Dolben's poetry also employs many of the techniques used by Hopkins and other Tractarian poets. These inc1ude biblical allusion and typology, a recognition of the analogy between classical Greek literature and Christianity, and the employment of poetry as an resthetic and a palliative device. As well, Dolben shared with Hopkins an interest in the rituals of religion, one of the identifying characteristics of the Oxford Movement.2
