华金，nice idea!

Here's my attempt at pseudo-criticism.

The poem is about the juxtaposition of grueling labor in a crowded mine with having purity in this life. Purity comes through hard work.

It's a short poem. Four lines total, 7-characters per line. Each line can be divided into 4+3 characters. The first four characters (千锤万凿、烈火焚烧、粉骨碎身) introduce the topic of each line, and are further divisible into 2+2. The lines seem to follow a regular pattern of stress:

1 2 3 4 / 1 2 3

The first three lines work out the theme of labor and toil, with images of working implements, fire, broken bodies and powdered bones. The true theme of the poem (salvation/purity) isn't revealed until the last line, where it comes unexpectedly and changes the meaning of the whole.

AAAB: toil/toil/toil/purity

I think this use of form is symbolic of toil and purity more generally. In the poem (as in real life) purity is worked out through toil. Yet purity is unseen during the process, and is revealed (unexpectedly) only at the end of it.

The poet doesn't identify a definite subject. There are no pronouns at all. Presumably the "thousand hammers and ten-thousand chisels" is a stand-in for the real subject: workers working out their salvation in this life, i.e., all of us.

A real analysis would need to take the author's life and 15th-century (Ming?) poetry into account. Sadly, I know exactly nothing about this. Brendan, David, Echo? Haha. Just asked my wife. She said every Chinese kid reads this poem in school but she forgot what it was about.

I hadn't seen the character 凿 before. Is that the usual way of writing "chisel" in Chinese?

How would you translate the second line“烈火焚烧若等闲”? "The raging flames and fire seem ordinary/commonplace"?