To what serves mortal beauty?
Dangerous; does set dancing blood….
What do then? How meet beauty?
Merely meet it;
own, home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift;
then leave, let that alone,
Yea, wish that though, wish all,
God’s better beauty, grace.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 -1889), To what serves Moral Beauty?
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, 'I think then no one can admire beauty of the body more than I do.... But this kind of beauty is dangerous'! Hopkins was an 'high church' Anglican who became a Jesuit priest in 1866, and burnt all his poems. In1875 he started to write again. He believed we all have an 'inscape' - what we really are, and not only what others want us to be.
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