A girl is described in seven short lines, and by the end she is already a skeleton under a drift of leaves. That compression gives saahhx's "a maiden's corpse" its odd force. Nothing happens in it. The only verb forms are "hold" and "covering", so it reads less like a story than a still picture, a tableau held up for us to look at. Nothing in the text says who the maiden was or how she died, and the poem never asks. It cares about what she has become.
The central idea is a clash between youth and age inside one body. "A soul so young / But a corpse so old" splits the girl in two. The soul stays fixed at the moment of her brightness, while the body goes on aging long after death. The idea is strange, a corpse that keeps getting older, but it is also true to how we picture the dead: remembered as young, yet physically worn away by time. The word "But" is the hinge on which the whole poem turns.
The imagery drains as the poem goes on. Line one gives the only real colour, "bright as gold", and after that everything fades into "dry and hollow bones" and mist. The word "casket" does quiet work here. It can mean a coffin, but it can also mean a small box for jewels, and set beside "gold" and "delicate" it makes the girl sound like a treasure kept in a case. The reader can take the casket as a literal coffin or as her own fragile body, and the poem does not choose. Both readings fit the tenderness of the language. "Delicate" is a surprising word for something that holds a dead body, and it shows the speaker handling her with care.
The sound patterns carry meaning too. Lines one, three and four end on the same sound: "gold", "old", "hold". Because "gold" and "old" rhyme, the brightness and the age are already tied together by sound before the poem admits it. The gold was always going to be old. "Young" and "bones" are left unrhymed, as if youth and the bare remains of the body had nothing to answer them. The ending then repeats itself: "amist" is followed by "mist" in the last line, so the rhyme is nearly the same word said twice. "Amist" is an unusual form, built like "afire" or "aglow", and the poet seems to have coined it (that is an inference from the unusual spelling). It suggests the seasons themselves are lost in haze, and it may also echo "amiss", the sense that something is wrong. Either way, the repeated mist makes the memory of her feel blurred and fading.
The rhythm is loose rather than strict. Counting syllables roughly, the lines run seven, four, five, seven, six, five and eleven. "A soul so young" is the briefest line, almost a held breath, and the final line is by far the longest. "Sakura leaves covering her like a mist" spreads across the page as the leaves spread over the body, and it lets the poem end on a slow exhale instead of a snap.
The word "sakura" brings a lot with it. Cherry blossom is widely associated with beauty that is brief and falls quickly, so it suits a poem about a young life. The poet writes "leaves", though, not blossoms or petals. Leaves come after the flowers, so the detail suggests the season of bloom is over. Together with "seasons past", it makes the leaves a kind of calendar, with time itself burying her. No one in the poem does the burying. Nature does it, softly, like a veil, and that keeps the tone elegiac instead of gruesome, even with words as blunt as "corpse" and "bones".
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It has no "I", no outcry and no explanation, only an observer looking at something beautiful and ruined. Its few chosen words each carry a double meaning: the casket that is also a treasure box, the gold that is already old, the mist that is both simile and memory. For a student, it shows how sound, word choice and line length can say what a paragraph of explanation could not.