ABSTRACT
To the postmodern reader, the phenomenon of auditory conversion seems more appropriately located in an earlier era of overt Christian mysticism, and the proposal to re-examine it, in an age so near to our own, may seem out of place or at least questionable. Inevitably, at a time when natural sounds were being both enhanced and supplanted by mechanically transmitted ones, a certain nostalgia attached itself to conventional literary sonic tropes, such as birdsong. Cardinal Newman was himself a musician, an accomplished amateur violinist and composer, who in childhood had played string quartets with his siblings, and while at Oxford played Beethoven sonatas with his friend Joseph Blanco White. Gerard Manley Hopkins's attention to the auditory sense builds upon that of his spiritual father, Cardinal Newman. Hopkins also acknowledged that the "Elected Silence" of God could become a void, a darkness.
