Herbert, a priest of the Church of England in the seventeenth century, wrote here as a sinner rather than a preacher. He doesn't confess one sin. He describes how sin works: thoughts breed words, words breed deeds, and deeds send him back to wicked thoughts. The poem's central idea is that wrongdoing is a self-feeding machine, and the poem is built to run like one.
The most striking feature is the chain that links the stanzas. The last line of each stanza becomes the first line of the next, and the final line, "Sorry I am, my God, sorry I am," returns to the poem's opening words. The title's "round" therefore works in several ways. It is a circuit, and the word can also name a song in which voices take up the same melody in turn. The reader can't find an exit, just as the speaker can't. Each stanza follows the same pattern of rhyme, ababcc, and ends on a couplet. That closing pair feels like a lock clicking shut, and its second line is the one that springs open the next stanza. Even the rhymes circle: "am" in the first stanza is only a near-rhyme for "flame," and the poem ends on the same loose chime of "shame" and "am."
The imagery is vivid and often disturbing. In the first stanza the offences "course it in a ring," like something chasing round a track. The thoughts work "like a busy flame" and finally "hatch" a cockatrice, the legendary serpent said to kill with a glance. The verb is domestic and almost cosy, as if the mind were a nest, which makes the monster more horrible. The opening line is a stressed, repeated lament, with "Sorry" falling heavily on the first beat, and it sounds more like a groan than a considered statement.
In the second stanza the fire escapes into speech. Words burst out "like the Sicilian hill," which judging by the image is a volcano, and the speaker no longer controls the eruption. Then the metaphor changes to trade: the words "vent their wares, and pass them with their faults," like a dishonest shopkeeper passing off damaged goods. "Ventilate" is a clever choice. It suggests spreading and airing the ill, but fresh air is also what makes a fire burn more fiercely, so the breath of speech feeds the flame from stanza one. The phrase "lewd intentions" probably meant something broader to Herbert's readers than it does now, closer to "base" or "wicked," and the point is that words aren't enough to satisfy such intentions. The hands must "join to finish the inventions," and "inventions" carries an odd double meaning of creative and fraudulent.
The third stanza is the most ingenious. Sin rises "three stories high," so thought, word and deed become floors of one building. The comparison with Babel is pointed. In the biblical story the tower-builders were stopped when their language was confused, but Herbert says his sin grew "before there were dissentions." Nothing in him argues back. His thoughts, words and deeds work in perfect agreement, and that unity is exactly what makes the structure so dangerous. Then comes the sting: ill deeds do not "loiter," because they "supply / New thoughts of sinning," and the ground floor is restocked for another climb.
Part of the poem's significance is that its form is its argument. A reader doesn't just hear that sin repeats, but is carried round the loop and delivered back to the first line. The poem is also not purely despairing. Every revolution of the circle is addressed to "my God," so the cycle of sin is matched by a cycle of prayer. The ending can be read bleakly, as a speaker who can never break free, or more hopefully, as a speaker who keeps returning to honest repentance. Either way, the poem is memorable because it is plain about the problem. It shows the mind as a place where small, private sparks can grow into something very large, and it doesn't pretend that feeling sorry is the same as being finished with the fire.