Anyone who has got up early to prepare a welcome, only to find the guest already awake and bearing gifts of their own, will recognise the situation in George Herbert's opening stanza. The speaker has gathered "flowers to straw Thy way" and "boughs off many a tree", an image that recalls the Gospel scene of crowds spreading branches before Christ. But the effort is wasted: "Thou wast up by break of day, / And brought'st Thy sweets along with Thee." The one being honoured has beaten the honourer to it. The poem's central idea is that Christ's resurrection cannot be matched, welcomed or outshone by anything human or natural. It simply arrives first, and it arrives complete.
The poem is built as three quarrelling-then-settling quatrains, each moving further from the speaker's small world. The first is personal and told in the past tense, full of "I got me" and homely, practical verbs. The second widens to the whole sky. Herbert imagines the sunrise, the most glorious daily event there is, and gives it a courtly, almost legal vocabulary: if the sun and the perfumed East "should offer to contest / With Thy arising, they presume." Even here the sun is treated fairly. It really does "give light", and the East really does "perfume", yet the one word "presume" puts both in their place. The third stanza drops the narrative and asks a question, and the answer is built into the asking: "Can there be any day but this?"
The most important word in the poem may be one that never changes its sound. In Herbert's spelling "sunne" is the sun, and Christians hear in it the Son as well. Herbert never says so outright, and the pun works quietly beneath the surface. It explains why the second stanza can talk about "arising" with such authority: the sunrise becomes a picture of the Resurrection, and then a rival that loses to it. By the third stanza the plural "many sunnes to shine endeavour" turns the pun into an argument. There are many suns, many days, many mornings, but only one that counts.
That argument is clinched by a small piece of arithmetic. "We count three hundred, but we misse." The rounded-down figure suggests a year's worth of days, and "misse" works twice: the sum comes out wrong, and we miss the point. Counting is exactly the wrong tool for this subject. The last line corrects the sum with a hammer-blow of plain words: "There is but one, and that one ever." Almost every word has one syllable, and "one" appears twice, so the line sounds like something stated rather than argued. Its final word, "ever", also leaves the day unfinished, stretching Easter beyond a calendar date into something unending.
The form supports this plainness. Each stanza rhymes ABAB, and the lines are mostly iambic tetrameter, eight syllables with a steady rise and fall that suits a "song". The pattern is so regular that the small bends stand out. In stanza two, "th' East" is squeezed into one beat to keep the line even, while in stanza three, "endeavour" gives the line an extra unstressed syllable, as if the many rival suns were straining to fit in the line and failing. The rhymes do some quiet work too: "East" chimes with "contest" and "perfume" with "presume", linking nature's gifts directly to the sin of overreaching.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It is only twelve lines long, and Herbert, a priest as well as a poet, uses no elaborate theology and no showy imagery. He gives us a single, humble human gesture, an armful of flowers, and lets it be overtaken by the dawn. The reversal is gently funny and also humbling. The speaker thinks he is the host preparing a welcome, but he turns out to be the guest, receiving sweetness he never had to fetch. Few poems say so clearly that the best gifts are the ones we are given first.