Turn the page on its side and Herbert's poem becomes a picture. Each stanza narrows to a pinch in the middle and flares out again, and the result looks like a pair of outspread wings. It is a clever trick, but more than a trick, because the shape is the argument. The speaker prays on Easter Day to be lifted out of ruin, and the lines fall and rise as the speaker hopes to.
The first stanza tells the human story in miniature. God made man "in wealth and store", and man "foolishly" threw it away, "Decaying more and more". As the sentence runs down, the lines shrink from ten syllables to two: "Till he became / Most poor." The shortest line carries the lowest point, so the poem is itself impoverished at the spot where it says poverty. Then comes a turn, "With thee", also only two syllables, and the lines begin to grow again as the speaker asks to "rise / As larks, harmoniously". The lark is a well-chosen bird because it sings as it climbs, so rising and praising become a single action. The stanza ends on its boldest idea: "Then shall the fall further the flight in me." The fall is not just something to recover from. It helps the flight along.
The second stanza narrows the focus from "he" to "I". The speaker's life began "in sorrow" and has been marked by "sicknesses and shame", which the speaker reads as punishment for sin. The poem has moved from a loss of wealth to a loss of flesh, from "Most poor" to "Most thin". Then comes its most unusual image: "if I imp my wing on thine". To imp is a term from falconry, meaning to graft new feathers onto a damaged wing so the bird can fly again. The speaker is therefore not an eagle soaring on its own strength but a hurt bird that can only fly if it is mended with something stronger. The word "combine" supports this, as does the small, humble "if". The closing line echoes the first stanza's ending, with "Affliction" in place of "fall" and "advance" in place of "further". Suffering is again presented as something that moves the speaker forward.
The sound patterns tighten this symmetry. Both stanzas follow the same rhyme scheme, alternating through the first five lines and then again through the last five. The pivot word "thee" rhymes with the final word "me" in each stanza, so the speaker's "me" answers God's "thee" in sound as well as in sense. Both stanzas also hinge on the same word, "became", first for humankind and then for the speaker. The rhythm is mostly iambic, and the long opening lines move steadily. The tiny middle lines force the reader to slow down and stress both words, so "Most poor" and "Most thin" land like bare, heavy facts. The tone throughout is humble but not despairing. "Shall" gives the ending real confidence.
What makes the poem significant is how fully form and meaning fit together. Many poems describe a fall and a recovery. This one makes the reader's eye and voice go through them. Herbert, who was a clergyman as well as a poet, uses that union of shape and sense to express a hopeful paradox at the heart of the Easter message: loss, shame and pain are not simply cancelled by resurrection but can be turned into lift. The phrase "this day", used twice, keeps the victory in the present, as something the speaker feels now rather than only remembers.
The poem is also easy to enjoy without any special knowledge. A reader can see the wings before understanding a single word, and then find that each image, from the shrinking lines to the singing lark to the mended feathers, supports the same idea.