Digby Mackworth Dolben

Digby Augustus Stewart Mackworth Dolben (8 February 1848 – 28 June 1867) was an English poet who died young from drowning.

He was educated at Cheam School and Eton College, studying under the influential Master William Johnson Cory whose principles of pedagogy and collection of verses Ionica inspired his own poetry.

He marked his romantic attachment to another pupil a year older than he was, Martin Le Marchant Gosselin, by writing love poetry.

[2] In 1865 on his seventeenth birthday, he was introduced by Bridges, by then an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to Gerard Manley Hopkins who was at Balliol.

[3] Hopkins was completely taken with Dolben, who was nearly four years his junior, and his private journal for confessions the following year proves how absorbed he was in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts of him[4]Hopkins kept up a correspondence with Dolben, wrote about him in his diary and composed two poems about the youth, "Where art thou friend" and "The Beginning of the End.