Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian approaches to the problems of perception: Affirming the metaphysical in the physical

Abstract

This article addresses how Hopkins’s concept of inscape interacts with issues of perception in 19th-century scientific discourse. In particular, I address the problem of attention, a tool deemed essential for scientists during this period. Attention can be defined as an act of will toward an object of perception that will overcome subjective conclusions and produce more reliable objective knowledge. In this essay, I consider how attention influenced the development of Hopkins’s inscape and demonstrate how four poems, “The Candle Indoors,” “The Lantern Out of Doors,” and the sonnets “The Windhover” and “As kingfishers catch fire,” attempt to solve the problems of sustaining attention to achieve reliable knowledge about both the physical and the metaphysical reality contained within God’s creation.

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