Four short lines, and in them a speaker standing in a garden giving orders to the light. The scene is private and a little absurd, and the poem knows it. Its central idea is that hope, at its most modest, can be a kind of instruction: you can't make the world deliver what you want, but you can say aloud what you're waiting for and then try to wait well.
The image at the center is the odd one. Why should light be herrings? Light in a garden doesn't hold still. It flickers through leaves, flashes off wet surfaces, and shifts from one moment to the next, much as a shoal turns all at once and catches the sun. Herrings are small, silvery and numerous, and they travel in great crowds. The word "herrings" is a plural that sounds slightly unusual, and it makes the fish countable, so we imagine individual glints rather than a single mass. There is also a pleasing mismatch in the poem. A garden is a patch of land tended by hand, and herrings belong to open water. The speaker asks for the sea to arrive in a place where only small, domestic things grow. That gap between what the setting offers and what the speaker wants is where the poem's hope lives.
The title does a lot of quiet work. "Schooling" names what fish do when they gather, and it also names teaching. A third meaning, school as discipline, hovers underneath, since to school someone is to train or correct them. All three fit. The speaker is schooling the light, instructing it in how to behave, and the light is imagined as a school of fish. But the final line turns the lesson back on the speaker. "Come in good time" asks for patience, and it is the speaker who most needs that lesson. The gerund suggests something ongoing, not a single act but a practice repeated day after day.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, though the first line, "Alone in the garden of little hopes," has a gentle, walking rhythm. It is the longest line by some distance, and the three that follow are short, almost like a net being drawn in. Sound links the words in subtle ways. "Alone" and "hopes" share a long *o* that frames the first line. The long *i* in "I," "light" and "time" connects the speaker to the thing addressed and to the waiting. Even the initial *h* of "hopes" returns in "herrings," so that by sound the hopes have already begun to turn into fish. The line breaks matter too. "I tell the light" ends on its subject, and then "to be herrings" arrives on a line of its own, short and surprising. The verb is "be," not "become" or "look like." The poem makes no comparison and simply issues a command, the grammar of a child's game or of a spell.
The tone keeps this from being grand. "Little hopes" is both modest and affectionate, and "garden" suggests the slow, unforceful work of planting and waiting. The idiom "in good time" can mean eventually, and it can also mean at a good moment or in a good season. After the bossy "I tell," the closing phrase is almost courteous, as if the speaker realizes that even the light must be asked politely. Judging by the word "herrings," there may also be a faint, wry echo of "red herring," a false lead. If so, the speaker may be quietly admitting that hopes can mislead. That is an inference, but the poem's humor makes it plausible.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much turning it manages in so little space. It begins with solitude and ends with an invitation, and it moves from the garden to the sea without raising its voice. It also shows a kind of honesty about hope. Rather than pretending that wishing works, the poem lets the speaker know the wish is slightly ridiculous and makes it anyway. The silver shoal never appears in the text, only the asking. Whether it arrives is left to the reader's own garden and the light that comes there.