Overhearing and Underseeing: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Accident of the Poem

Recent criticism on Gerard Manley Hopkins has yet to reckon fully with the place of doctrine in his poetry. Out of suspicion of his religious commitments as irreconcilable with the novelty of his craft, critics direct attention away from his poems’ doctrinal underpinnings to their more palatable features of sensory phenomena. This sidestepping presupposes a model of the poem as a record of experience that readers can inhabit and envision. But this essay offers an alternative model of the poem, one that views it as an object of perceptual inscrutability, through a new close reading of Hopkins’s “The Windhover.” In particular, this reading uncovers how “The Windhover” animates key ideas about religious belief laid out in John Henry Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. Through what this article calls “overhearing” and “underseeing”—aesthetic effects that give rise to precise yet visually obscure perceptions—“The Windhover” enables readers to apprehend the singular shape of a religious experience, what Newman calls “accident,” without experiencing its actual phenomenal content. This strange form of secondhand contact offers us a new way to conceptualize the relationship between religious thought and poetic form. In Hopkins’s hands, poetic form records the ways that religious experience simultaneously relies on and withdraws from the language that expresses it. If certain religious experiences do not lend themselves to direct representation, Hopkins’s aesthetic techniques of second-handedness precisely outline or contour an otherwise uninhabitable rendering of contact made with the divine.