The speaker opens with a question that sounds more like a sigh: what hope could possibly change the years that remain? There's a sense of time already weighing heavily, and no easy answer comes. What follows is a picture of someone worn thin. Even ordinary light through a window is too much to bear, and in winter the warmth of a fire, or perhaps some inner fire of feeling, is just as hard to face. The word "raw" suggests a nerve left exposed.
Then the poem shifts in a surprising way. Hope, now so tender and stripped back, becomes "an instrument for wrens," as if it's no longer a grand promise but something small, light and alive, a thing that belongs to birds. The final lines turn quietly firm: the speaker believes "in all that must be lost." It isn't cheerful, but it isn't despairing either. The mood is hushed, bare and oddly accepting, finding a kind of faith in loss itself.