Hopkins's speaker describes weeds as "in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush" in this poem. This is unusual because it celebrates the beauty and abundance of weeds, when, more typically, weeds are seen as undesirable and invasive plants that people wish to be rid of it. Here, however, their energy—they seem to grow or roll in "wheels"—is appreciated, while the alliteration of the l sounds in long, lovely, and lush emphasize growth and beauty.

Hopkins's vision of spring is all-inclusive. He understands anything that is fecund or growing as part of the beauty of God's creation and therefore as desirable. The weeds are simply on a list of new things that emerge in spring, along with the thrush's eggs and the singing of the thrush, the "glassy" or light-reflecting leaves of the "peartree," and the energetic blue of the sky itself, which the leaves of the trees seem to brush. Even the lambs are included in this vision of nature reproducing itself with abandon as winter ends.

Hopkins sees all of this as an echo of the original Garden of Eden or paradise. In early spring, all the new life carries with it the freshness of the earth in its first creation. Hopkins's speaker advises us to experience spring in all its newness before it begins to age and "sour with sin."