Hopkins's "Peace" begins as a complaint and ends as a correction. The speaker, who is plainly a religious believer addressing "my Lord", pleads with Peace to stop hovering and settle. He pictures it as a "wild wooddove, shy wings shut", circling him without ever landing in his branches. He refuses to pretend otherwise: "I'll not play hypocrite / To own my heart." Peace does visit, he admits, "but / That piecemeal peace is poor peace." The sestet ends on a bitter question. How can peace be called pure when it permits "alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it"?
The second half answers with a surprising consolation. Peace is a "reaving" thing, a plunderer that takes itself away, so God leaves something "in lieu", in its place. That substitute is "Patience exquisite", which "plumes to Peace thereafter". When Peace finally does move in, the poem's last line overturns the sentimental picture of it: "He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo, / He comes to brood and sit." Peace here is no soothing ornament. It is something that sits on the nest and hatches.
The form makes this turn feel earned. Hopkins uses a shortened sonnet, ten and a half lines, which he called a curtal sonnet. The rhymes in the first six lines run *shut / boughs / hypocrite / but / allows / it*, and the second part pulls them back: *house* answers *boughs* and *allows*, and *exquisite* and *sit* echo *hypocrite* and *it*. The poem keeps circling back to its own sounds, like the dove it describes. That last line is cut to half length and indented, so the poem stops abruptly and sits still, exactly as it describes.
Hopkins also wrote in what he called sprung rhythm, which counts stresses rather than syllables. The effect is clearest in the opening: "wild wooddove, shy wings shut" packs heavy beats together so that each word seems to land with its own small thud. The syntax is just as strained. "Your round me roaming end" is a contorted way of saying "end your roaming round me", and the contortion mimics a mind too agitated to speak smoothly. The stammer of "When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?" does the same job. Then there is the sound of "piecemeal peace is poor peace", where the repeated *p* sounds make the phrase feel spat out, a flat, almost petulant judgement.
The bird imagery runs through the whole poem and quietly changes meaning. At first the dove is a skittish visitor and the speaker is a tree hoping to be chosen, which makes his *boughs* a kind of hospitality. Then "plumes" turns up as a verb: Patience grows feathers and becomes Peace. Patience, in other words, is the young bird and Peace the grown one, so what looked like a poor consolation turns out to be Peace in an earlier form. Finally "brood" brings in a second sense. A dove that broods is hatching eggs, and I'd suggest the word also recalls the Spirit brooding over the waters in the opening of Genesis, a link the religious vocabulary makes plausible. Either way, the contrast between "coo" and "brood" carries the poem's argument. Cooing is pleasant noise, while brooding is patient, warm, unglamorous labour.
What makes the poem significant is how much it packs into so few lines, and how honestly. It does not claim that faith delivers calm on demand. The speaker is impatient, the wars are real, and he says so. The answer he reaches is that peace is not an absence of struggle but something that comes through endurance and then keeps working, quietly, once it arrives. The poem also practises what it preaches. It starts in agitation and finishes in a single settled line, so the reader gets a small taste of the patience it describes. For a student, it's a good example of how sound, rhyme and even line length can carry an idea as well as the words do.