Herbert's poem begins like a fairy tale. A speaker sets out to find a lost person, "Sweet Peace," and asks her address as if she were a neighbour who has moved house. Three searches fail, and a fourth, with an old man, finally succeeds. Herbert was a clergyman as well as a poet, and the poem's ending, which sounds like a sermon turned into a gift, suits that background. But the poem can be understood without any of that. It makes its point through a story, and the story is built with great care.
The form is the first clue to how it works. Every stanza has six lines of unequal length, which run roughly ten, four, eight, six, ten and four syllables. The long lines carry the narrative, and the short ones land like a gasp or an echo. "Let me once know" is a plea cut short. "Go seek elsewhere" is a curt dismissal, the kind of thing a hollow wind might actually say. The rhymes interlock in the pattern ABACBC, so that in the first stanza "know" is answered by "No," a small shock of disappointment built into the sound. The word "where" also keeps resurfacing at line ends ("there," "elsewhere," "ev'ry where," and "there" again), so the poem's opening question quietly follows us to the end.
The three failed searches share a pattern. Each looks promising from a distance and falls apart on contact. The cave offers only a "hollow wind," and the emptiness is in the answer itself. The rainbow seems to be "the lace of Peace's coat," a lovely detail that turns Peace into a figure whose hem the speaker has just glimpsed. But the clouds "break and scatter," and the verbs themselves seem to fall apart. The best moment is the flower. The crown-imperial looks so grand that the speaker reasons "Peace at the root must dwell," and he digs. What he finds is a worm devouring "what showed so well." Note how often he leaps to certainty: "Surely, thought I" and "Sure, said I." Each time the poem punishes that confidence by showing how beauty on the surface can hide decay.
When the old man arrives, the poem changes pace. He doesn't argue. He tells a story, and the story is in a plain, almost folk-tale style: a Prince, "flock and fold," a grave, stalks of wheat. The poem's imagery points toward Christ here, with Salem recalling both Jerusalem and the Hebrew word for peace, and the "twelve stalks" suggesting the apostles. Even for a reader who doesn't pick up these references, the story has a clear shape. "He sweetly lived; yet sweetness did not save / His life from foes." This line is surprisingly honest, because it admits that peace is no guarantee of safety. Yet something grows "out of his grave," and the failure of the earlier searches is reversed. The speaker dug into a flower and found death. Here death opens into a harvest.
The final stanza turns the story into an invitation. "Take of this grain, which in my garden grows, / And grows for you." The old man's garden answers the earlier one: this plant, unlike the crown-imperial, has nothing rotten at its root. The instruction to "make bread of it" is startlingly domestic. Peace turns out to be something you can hold, break and eat, which fits the earlier line that the grain's "virtue" (its power, in the older sense of the word) brings "peace and mirth / By flight of sin." That phrase ties peace to forgiveness and a lighter conscience, not just to quiet surroundings.
What makes the poem memorable is the way it reverses the quest. The speaker spends six stanzas looking outward at caves, skies and gardens. The answer is a gift handed over, and the last line, "Is only there," finally answers the question of the first. The humble, almost childlike voice of the opening ("I humbly crave") turns out to be exactly what the poem is about. Peace is not found by the cleverest searcher but received by the one willing to ask and listen.