Hopkins begins with an ordinary scene, a bright, blustery day after a storm, and refuses to describe it quietly. Clouds are "puffball," "torn tufts," "tossed pillows," then "heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs," a rowdy crowd marching along an "air-built thoroughfare." Sunlight falling through elm branches becomes "shivelights and shadowtackle," invented words that make the flicker of light and shade feel like splintered wood and ship's rigging. The wind "ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare / Of yestertempest's creases," and even the drying of puddles is violent: mud is squeezed into "dough, crust, dust," and the "manmarks" of human footprints are stanched and starched away.
The title explains what he is watching. Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, pictured the world as a place of endless change, with fire as its emblem. Line nine says it plainly: "Million-fuelèd, nature's bonfire burns on." The next lines turn this into a threat. Nature has fuel enough to keep burning, but a person is a single spark: "Man, how fast his firedint, / his mark on mind, is gone!" Fire turns into water here. Everything is "Drowned" in an "enormous dark," and Hopkins lets his grief break the poem's shape. "O pity and indig / nation!" splits the word in two at the line's midpoint mark, as though anger had cut the word off mid-breath. A human being who "shone / Sheer off, disseveral, a star" is blotted out, and even his traces are blurred by "vastness" and levelled by time.
Then comes one word, "Enough!", and the poem swerves. The Resurrection arrives as "A heart's-clarion," a trumpet-call, and the imagery moves from fire to shipwreck. The speaker's "foundering deck" is lit by "a beacon, an eternal beam." Hopkins reuses a word from the despairing section: the lost man "shone" like a star, and now the rescuing light "shone" across the deck. The poem does not pretend the earlier darkness was false. It answers the same image with a stronger one.
The sound of the verse does much of this work. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, and he called his method sprung rhythm, which counts stressed beats rather than syllables, so heavy stresses can crowd together. The marks in the lines as printed here show the pauses that split each long line into two surging halves. Consonants pile up in lines like "Shivelights and shadowtackle in long / lashes lace, lance, and pair." The rhymes work like the scene they describe. In the first section "arches," "parches," "marches," and "starches" tramp along together. In the consolation the rhymes shrink to blunt monosyllables, "trash," "ash," "flash," "crash," and they hit like a collapse followed by a sudden blaze.
The ending is the most daring stretch. Hopkins reasons that "I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am," so that sharing human nature gives humans a share in Christ's. Then he insults himself in a pile of short, jostling words: "This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood." Each is cheap, broken, or flammable, and matchwood is made for burning. After the earlier bonfire, that word is the cruelest and most precise. The last two words flip the whole list: "immortal diamond." Because the line is repeated alone as a short tail, the claim has no room to wobble. Diamond is also a hard, bright stone formed from carbon, the same element as the ash and charcoal that fire leaves behind. Hopkins does not say this, but the poem invites the thought that what fire cannot destroy is brought out by it.
What makes the poem matter is that it earns its comfort. Many poems about death console from a safe distance. Hopkins first makes the loss physical and frightening, with wind scouring the earth, footprints erased, and a human being vanishing in the dark. His faith then arrives as a violent, joyful flash of belief. The poem's own language is as restless as the nature it describes, and in the last lines that energy is turned toward hope.