Hopkins begins with a flat, almost childlike claim: "Nothing is so beautiful as spring." There is no hedging, and the rest of the octave simply proves it. The first evidence is surprising, because it isn't blossom. It is weeds, shooting up "in wheels", which suggests the circular rosettes of leaves that spread out from a single point. Even the humblest plants are "long and lovely and lush", and the three l-words make the line itself sprout. Hopkins's Christian faith, which the sestet makes explicit (he was a Jesuit priest), seems already to be at work here. If weeds are lovely, nothing in the spring world is too ordinary to carry glory.
The images that follow keep blurring earth and sky. Thrush's eggs are "little low heavens", small blue domes that hold the sky in miniature. A few lines later the pear tree's "glassy" leaves "brush / The descending blue", as though heaven were leaning down to touch the branches. The sound-world is just as physical. The thrush sings so that it can "rinse and wring / The ear", a washing metaphor that makes the song feel like cold water through a cloth, and the sound strikes "like lightnings". Spring here is not gentle or pastoral. It is loud, wet, bright and slightly violent, and the racing lambs with their "fair" fling are part of the same overflow.
The way the poem is built adds to this. It is a sonnet, split into an octave rhyming *abba abba* and a sestet rhyming *cdcdcd*. The octave leans on only two sounds, *-ing* and *-ush*: spring, wring, sing, fling against lush, thrush, brush, rush. The repetition makes the verse feel as crowded as the season. Hopkins's own term for his rhythm was "sprung rhythm", which counts stresses rather than syllables. That is why the lines feel packed and sometimes tumble forward. "Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush" runs straight over the line break into "Through the echoing timber", so the bird's song seems to burst out of the rhyme position itself.
Then comes the turn, and it is a question: "What is all this juice and all this joy?" The word "juice" is wonderfully unpoetic, close to fruit and sap, and it keeps the answer rooted in the body. The reply is that spring is "a strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning / In Eden garden". A "strain" is both a trace and a musical phrase, so spring becomes a remembered tune from before the Fall. The beauty of the season is an echo of paradise.
That idea changes the mood of the sestet. The syntax tightens into urgent commands: "Have, get, before it cloy, / Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning". The three verbs of decline, *cloy*, *cloud* and *sour*, move from too much sweetness to dimness to spoiled taste, as if joy slowly goes off. What Hopkins wants protected is "Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy", and the pairing of mind with Mayday ties inner purity to the freshness of the season. Children are the human spring, and like the season they can be soured. The last line turns to Christ as "maid's child", the son of a young woman, and calls this innocence "thy choice and worthy the winning". The poem ends as a prayer, and the order of its words implies that the winning, not the keeping, is the point. Innocence has to be actively won.
What makes the poem matter is that it won't let beauty stand alone. Many spring poems celebrate and stop. Hopkins celebrates so intensely that the intensity itself raises a worry: if this is a leftover of Eden, it can also be lost. The octave's rush of sound and the sestet's anxious pleading belong together, and the poem moves from delight to something like protectiveness. It also shows how a poet can make language behave like its subject, with words that crowd, rinse, spring and race, until the reader feels the season before being told what to think about it.