Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, and the question in his title carries real weight: what is a person of faith to do with the dangerous pull of a beautiful face? The poem's first answer is startlingly physical. Beauty "does set dancing blood," and the line break in "danc- / ing" makes the word itself stumble forward. Yet Hopkins does not tell the reader to look away. Beauty, he argues, "keeps warm / Men's wits to the things that are." It wakes the mind to reality and reminds us "what good means." A beautiful person is not a trap but a kind of proof that the world is worth paying attention to.
The octave tests this claim with a story. The "lovely lads" are "wet-fresh / windfalls of war's storm," boys blown down like fruit after a gale. The poem seems to allude to the old tradition of Gregory, later pope, who saw fair-haired English boys in Rome and was moved to send missionaries to their country. Hopkins gives the image a harvest vocabulary: windfalls, and Gregory who "gleanèd" them from "swarmed Rome." The point is that a glance at beauty changed the religious history of a whole nation: "God to a nation dealt that day's dear chance." Beauty here is practical, even providential. Hopkins also says that "a glance / Master more may than gaze," so a single look at real beauty can do more than a long stare, and can "gaze out of countenance" by overwhelming the one who stares.
The sound of the poem fits that energy. Hopkins wrote in what he called sprung rhythm, where the beat falls on stressed syllables and the number of unstressed ones can vary. The long lines here break in the middle, and the given text marks the pause, so each line feels like two breaths: a surge, a catch, then a second surge. The first line even breaks off in the middle of a word. The rhymes are tight and insistent. The octave runs *abbaabba*, with "glance," "countenance" and "chance" answering each other, and "form," "warm," "storm" and "swarm-" locking together. The split "swarm- / ed" makes the rhyme itself seem crowded. The syntax is crowded too. "The O-seal-that-so feature" reads like someone lost for words, pointing at a face that stamps itself on the mind like a seal on wax.
The sestet turns from example to rule. Humanity, he says, "needs would worship / block or barren stone," a pointed reference to idols, so the law is "Love what are love's worthiest." That means "men's selves," because "Self flashes off frame and face." The face is where a person's inner identity shows. Then comes the question every reader has been waiting for: "What do then? how meet beauty?" The answer is almost shockingly plain: "Merely meet it." Accept it, take it "home at heart" as "heaven's sweet gift," and "then leave, let that alone." The short, flat commands slow the poem after all that speed. They teach restraint without condemnation. Beauty is to be received, not possessed.
The last line makes the turn from restraint to generosity. "Yea, wish that though, wish all, / God's better beauty, grace." Having let the beautiful person go, the speaker does not feel loss. He wishes that person something greater, the beauty of grace, which no face can show. The rhyme of "face" with "grace" quietly carries the argument: outward beauty points past itself.
What makes the poem remarkable is that it refuses both easy answers. It does not treat physical beauty as sinful, and it does not let admiration slide into worship of the thing admired. It keeps the thrill ("dangerous," dancing blood) and the discipline together in fourteen packed lines. It is also a good example of why Hopkins reads so differently from most poets. His rhythm and word-splitting make the reader feel the very experience he describes, and the argument arrives with the force of a sudden look.