Christina Rossetti opens by announcing that she has "no wit, no words, no tears," and then goes on to produce twenty-four lines of precise, carefully shaped language. The contradiction is the point. The speaker feels too numb to speak, yet the poem shows that she can still pray. Its subject is spiritual exhaustion, the state in which "hopes or fears" have both gone dead. Its central idea is that even this emptiness can be handed over to God, and that the speaker's brokenness might become useful to him.
The form is plain and tightly controlled. Each of the three stanzas has eight lines rhymed ABABCDCD, and the lines are mostly four-beat iambics: "I have no wit, no words, no tears." Every stanza ends on a shortened line of about three beats that closes on the rhyme "me": "O Jesus, quicken me," then "rise in me," then "drink of me." The short line reads like a breath at the end of a long, heavy sentence. The repeated ending gives the poem the feel of a litany, but the verb changes each time, and the changes tell the story. "Quicken," an old word for "bring to life," asks for something done to her. "Rise" is the language of resurrection and spring. "Drink" turns the prayer around completely.
Before that turn, the imagery is bleak. The heart is "like a stone," and the speaker looks "right" and "left" to find only herself. She lifts her eyes, but the "everlasting hills" are hidden by grief. The phrase seems to echo the Psalmist's "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills," so that a familiar image of divine help is withheld here. In the second stanza, "My life is like..." is repeated like a hand pressing on a bruise, and the pictures shrink: a faded leaf, a harvest "dwindled to a husk," a "frozen thing." The harsh, dry sounds of "husk" and "dusk" suit the barren scene, and "tedious" is a surprisingly modern word for the flat boredom of despair. Then comes one small turn: "Yet rise it shall." The sap of spring appears as a certainty, not a wish, even though the speaker still cannot see "bud nor greenness."
The third stanza makes the sharpest change. A broken bowl is a good image of uselessness, since it "cannot hold / One drop of water for my soul / Or cordial in the searching cold." The "searching cold" is a nicely chosen phrase, because it seems to hunt for the weak spots. Here the speaker stops describing and starts asking, with the commands "Cast," "Melt," and "remould." The fire is frightening, but it is the only way a ruined object can be made new. The "perished thing" is to become "a royal cup for Him, my King." Notice also the rhyme words. In the first two stanzas the speaker's line ends in "see": she cannot see the hills, and she cannot see any greenness. In the last, the rhyme is "be," so the stanza moves from looking to becoming.
That is why the final line matters most. The speaker is no longer only asking to be rescued. She asks to be used, for Christ to "drink of" her, so that her emptiness becomes a vessel. The poem may also be hinting at the Christian image of a cup offered and drunk, though that is an inference from the imagery and not something the text states.
The title adds one more idea. Calling the resurrection "better" suggests that the speaker is hoping for a renewal that begins now, inside a withered life, and not only after death. The poem is significant because it takes despair seriously. It does not pretend that faith removes grief, and it gives numbness an honest voice. Yet it ends with a leap of trust. Rossetti uses simple, mostly one-syllable words for this, so the poem stays easy to follow and still carries real weight.