Winter is the quiet hero of "The Flower". Most spring poems celebrate the green and forget the cold, but George Herbert's speaker keeps returning to it, because renewal is only astonishing if you remember what came before. The opening cry, "How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean / Are thy returns!", is spoken straight to God by someone who has just come through a bad stretch and can hardly believe it is over. Grief, he says, "melts away / Like snows in May". The line is almost all one-syllable words, plain and quick, like the thaw it describes.
The central idea is that the spiritual life has seasons, and that the speaker's heart is a flower. In the second stanza it has "shrivelled" and gone "Quite under ground", yet it returns with "greenness". The poem makes that underground time oddly homely. The flowers go to "see their mother-root" and "keep house unknown", as if winter were a long visit with family rather than a death. Withering becomes hiding, and hiding becomes a kind of waiting.
The stanza shape reinforces this. All seven stanzas share one pattern: a rhyme scheme of ABABCCB, and lines that run long (ten syllables), then drop to two very short lines, then return to eight. Those short pairs, "Grief melts away / Like snows in May", work like a sudden drop or release, and the pattern recurs as the speaker's mood does. In the third stanza the idea of reversal sharpens: God is "Killing and quick'ning", and a funeral bell is turned into "a chiming". The speaker concludes that our everyday labels are unreliable: "We say amiss, / This or that is: / Thy word is all, if we could spell." The word "spell" suggests a child stumbling over letters. We misread what "death" and "life" mean because we can only half decipher the text.
The middle of the poem is its most honest part. The speaker wishes he were "past changing", fixed in a Paradise "where no flower can wither", and admits that he rises "growing and groaning thither", two words so close in sound that effort and pain seem to be one thing. The line "Nor doth my flower / Want a spring shower, / My sins and I joining together" is bleakly witty. The speaker's sins seem to supply the very rain he needs, though the wording is ambiguous enough to be read in more than one way. Then comes pride. He grows "in a straight line, / Still upwards bent, as if heav'n were mine own", and the stiff, upright stem becomes a picture of presumption. God's anger makes him "decline", and the poem reaches for geography to express it: "What frost to that? What pole is not the zone, / Where all things burn". Ordinary winter is nothing next to a divine frown, and the poles become the scorching tropics. The paradox of burning cold is the poem's most violent image.
Then the poem turns to itself. "And now in age I bud again, / After so many deaths I live and write; / I once more smell the dew and rain, / And relish versing." The speaker is telling us that the poem is a product of the recovery it describes, since his writing is returning along with his greenness. His old misery now seems like someone else's: "It cannot be / That I am he / On whom thy tempests fell all night." The phrase "all night" quietly promises that morning has arrived.
The final stanza repeats the earlier refrain with one change. "Lord of power" becomes "Lord of love", and the wonders now teach a lesson: "we are but flowers that glide." The reward is a "garden" to "bide" in. The last line, "Forfeit their Paradise by their pride", is strikingly stern after so much relief. The flower image is turned against ambition, and anyone "Swelling through store" is warned that the one thing a flower cannot do is try to be more than a flower.
That is why the poem lasts. It refuses to treat faith as a steady climb, and it admits dry spells, relapses and pride. The comparison with flowers carries the argument rather than decorating it, and the voice stays conversational even when the ideas are huge.