In Hopkins's hands, Hope is not a glowing abstraction but a woman with an aching arm. She holds up "the mind's own mirror" toward Christ, wanting it to catch "His lovely likeness more and more." That is the whole situation, and the drama comes from how such a simple act goes wrong. The mirror "will not well," so Hope sets about polishing it, and in the process loses sight of what the polishing was for.
The central idea is an ironic truth about spiritual effort. The harder the believer scrubs at her own flaws, the more she studies herself instead of the one she hoped to reflect. Hopkins builds this in small physical steps. First come tears: she washes the glass "from her welling eyes." Then breath: she "breathes the blots off all with sighs on sighs." Anyone who has breathed on a window knows what breath does to glass. It fogs it. The remedy clouds the surface, and the closing couplet admits as much: "she turned her mirror dim / Betweenwhiles, but she sees herself not Him." A mirror shows whoever looks into it, and she is looking in.
The wordplay is sharp. "It will not well" means the mirror isn't working properly, but two lines later "welling" eyes pour out tears, so the same sound turns failure into grief. Hopkins also makes the verb "holds" carry the poem's endurance. Hope "holds to Christ" at the start, and the second stanza has her hold "till hand aches." Faithfulness here is not serenity but stubborn muscle. The speaker is gentle about it, too. She is "as good as blind" from all that weeping, and she "wonders what is there," so her sincerity is never in doubt, only her vision.
The second stanza also holds the poem's most striking images. "Her glass drinks light" suggests the mirror is not merely reflecting but soaking up brightness, as if thirsty. Meanwhile she "darkles down behind," using a rare verb that sounds like "darkens" but also faintly like "sparkles" turned inside out. She is the shadow behind a lit surface. Then comes a surprise: she is "of all her glorious gainings unaware." The poem briefly suggests she is succeeding without knowing it. That sits uneasily beside the final couplet, where she sees only herself. The poem doesn't settle the contradiction, and the unsettled feeling is probably the point. Progress and self-absorption seem to exist in the same person at once.
The form is plain by comparison with the drama of the content. The lines are steady five-beat lines, easy to read aloud. The rhyme moves from an *ababcc* opening (out, more, about, before, eyes, sighs) to a tighter *abab* (blind, there, behind, unaware) and ends on a couplet. The couplet's rhyme is cruel in a quiet way: "dim" and "Him" sit side by side, the very word she can't see paired with the fog that hides it.
The rows of dots mark gaps, so what we have is a fragment, and the line "I told you that she turned her mirror dim" suggests we are joining a longer piece midway. That gives the poem an overheard, confiding tone, like a speaker reminding a friend of something already said. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, and the poem reads like spiritual self-examination, but the problem it describes is not limited to religion. Think of trying to fall asleep and being kept awake by trying, or of becoming so self-conscious in a speech that you forget your audience. The effort to be good, or sincere, or focused, can swing attention back onto the self.
That is what makes the poem worth reading despite its incompleteness. It treats faith as something tiring and imperfect, and it doesn't mock the woman for it. Her failure comes from caring too much, and Hopkins turns that into one of the most exact images of self-defeating effort in English poetry.