Hopkins looks at a portrait of a brother and sister and cannot simply praise it. His first line holds two feelings in one breath: "O I admire and sorrow!" The picture shows youth at its peak, and the viewer knows what lies ahead, the "dark tramplers, tyrant years." The central idea is that beauty and vulnerability cannot be separated. Time cannot be stopped, and even goodness is no guarantee, so the poem looks for something firmer than looks or health. It finds that in God, but it ends in protest rather than comfort.
The opening image is a quiet one. "A juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves", which is the sap of living things. Then the line swerves: "beauty's dearest veriest vein is tears." "Vein" works in several ways. It is the channel in a leaf, the vessel in a body, and the richest seam in a mine, so the most precious thing in beauty turns out to be sorrow. The second stanza corrects itself mid-thought. Happy parents? "Too fast," the speaker says, and shifts to a more cautious "thus far." These young people are "all heft, hope, hazard, interest": four heavy words, each carrying both promise and risk.
The form is steady, which makes the strain in the language easier to see. There are nine quatrains in rhymed ABAB, and the lines run close to ordinary iambic pentameter. Hopkins is famous for his springing, irregular rhythms, but here the pressure comes from packed vocabulary instead: coined compounds such as "havoc-pocked" and "day-dissolvèd dreams," and clusters of sound like "ringlet-race on burling Barrow brown." That last line, with its tumbling b's and r's, sounds like the river it describes. The portrait is set against that current. It is something that stops a fleeting moment, since the "fine, the fingering beams" of light "feature down" the young hour that would otherwise vanish. The wording suggests a photograph, though that is an inference.
The fourth stanza is the tenderest. She leans on him "with such contentment fond," and his eyes are "the soul's own letters," as if his gaze were handwriting. They "fall directly forth on life", a confident, forward look that the rest of the poem treats as dangerous. Then comes "But ah," and the poem stops being a description and becomes a sermon. That fits a Jesuit priest, which Hopkins was. Where, he asks the "bright forelock, cluster," is your "landmark, seamark, or soul's star"? Land, sea and sky between them cover every kind of map, and the answer is blunt and short: "Christ is truth." The next stanza leans on the scriptural saying that none is good but God.
The seventh stanza is the hardest and the most interesting. Human futures turn on "that list, that leaning in the will," which no "wisdom can forecast by gauge or guess." The "selfless self of self" is "fast furled," folded like a bud or a flag, "all foredrawn to No or Yes." A face in a portrait can show health and charm, but it cannot show which way that inner choice will go. The eighth stanza darkens further. "Worst will the best" suggests that excellence draws corruption to it, and the image is of a tree whose "hung-heavenward boughs" have been "havoc-pocked" by a worm. The garden hint is clear when the next stanza names "corruption" as "the world's first woe."
The ending refuses to settle. "What need I strain my heart beyond my ken?" sounds like someone backing away from a question too large for him. Then comes "O but I bear my burning witness though / Against the wild and wanton work of men." He cannot explain the problem, but he will not stay silent about it. The row of dots after the last line leaves the poem looking unfinished or cut off, which suits its restlessness, though that is a guess from the printed text.
What makes the poem significant is how far it travels from its occasion. A portrait of two attractive young people could prompt a pleasant compliment. Hopkins turns it into an argument about time, free will and moral risk, and he does not pretend the argument is neatly solved. The tenderness of the fourth stanza is real, and so is the fear that follows it. For a student, the poem is a good example of how admiration and anxiety can share the same lines, and how sound and compression can carry feeling that the plain statement only sketches.