Yesterday I was reading an biographer literary composition by G.M. Hopkins and saved it to be uncannily related to that of the Hindu political theory of Mortification and Renunciation as a funds to accomplish to divinity.
Hopkins' poem, The Habit of Perfection was cool as a cucumber in 1866, the same twelvemonth he was not long after acceptable into the Catholic Church. He musing it fit to contravene himself the temporal pleasures calculable from the senses in dictation to attain flawlessness in God's inspection.
Hopkins chooses spiritual Silence and invokes it to fascination his ears near its auditory communication. He then asks the chops to stay behind dumb, since they turn articulate just by speechless entry to God. He too asks the persuasion to delay leaving shut, because this alone enables them to see the uncreated heavenly fluffy. Normal eyesight, on the contrary, remainder bound; lost and distracted by the whirling pack of material possession. Likewise, he asks the palate, wherein is hold on all the gourmet's pleasures, not to starve for alcohol for drenching the palate, because in sacred fasts even cans and crusts are commonly pleasant and crunchy as the wine itself.
Further, the poet tells the nostrils that patch their everyday breath is dog-tired on the boosting and fixing of pride, they would appreciate by far the scent curly up from incense- attitude censers in the inner sanctum of the clerical. He besides tells the custody that wish to awareness the consistency of flowers and the feet that seek to touch the compressible giving way grass, that the feet will higher make a choice to step the gold-paved dual carriageway of heaven, and the hands will recovered pinch the consecrated Host from the temple and set aside the sacrament at the Mass.
Lastly, to out-and-out the activity of ne plus ultra the writer proposes to Poverty to be his bride, and at the marriage-feast he will give his spousal equivalent beside beamy white clothes, expressive of purity, like-minded lilies of the paddock which shall be neither labored nor spun.
The Habit of Perfection refers not sole to the albescent robe ("habit") that symbolizes perfection, but also to the dyed-in-the-wool disciplined chase of state by renouncing and transcending the esthetic pleasures. The poet's certainty is that one and only by a sure recantation from the outer international can one move into into the inmost friendly existence. The nursery rhyme suggests the victory of the ascetical all over the philosophy sideways of his outlook.
The verse form is autobiographical, but is divine in its trade goods.