Donne starts in the middle of an argument, with a question that sounds almost like a complaint: "Why are we by all creatures waited on?" The speaker is puzzled that humans, who sin, are served by a world that doesn't. The elements are "more pure," the animals blameless, and yet they bring "life and food" to him as if he were a master. For eleven lines this looks like a poem about the strange order of nature. Then the last three lines tell us it was only a preparation for something stranger. The real wonder is not that creation serves humanity, but that the Creator died for it.
The octave is built from questions with no answers, and the imagery makes the human position feel awkward. "Waited on" turns the natural world into a household of servants. The elements are called "prodigal," a word for lavish, almost wasteful giving, and it may recall the prodigal son of the parable, with the roles reversed. Here the elements pour out generosity while the human is the unworthy one. The speaker then speaks directly to the animals, to the "ignorant horse" and to the bull and boar, who "dissemble weakness" and let themselves be killed by "one man's stroke." That phrase is the point of the whole section. The animals could "swallow and feed upon" the whole human race, yet they submit. Their strength is a kind of secret, and their obedience looks like a deliberate pretence.
The turn comes in line 9: "Weaker I am, woe is me, and worse than you." The heavy w-sounds make the line sound like a sigh. The speaker has stopped questioning the animals and is judging himself. The reason follows: "You have not sinned, nor need be timorous." Sin and fear come as a pair here. The animals lack both, and humans have both. Then the poem shifts scale with "But wonder at a greater wonder." The repetition turns "wonder" from a verb into a noun in the space of five words, and the line reads like an order to look somewhere else.
The form supports this movement. The octave rhymes abba abba, as in a Petrarchan sonnet, but the sestet runs cddc and closes on an unexpected couplet. Verse of this period often sounds "-ion" endings as two syllables, which would let "corruption" and "subjection" chime with "on" and "upon" and keep the octave's rhyme tight. The rhythm is a loose iambic pentameter, and its irregularities suit the speaking voice. Line 4, "Simple, and further from corruption?", starts on a stress and tumbles forward, and the many questions give the first half a restless, probing pace. The couplet then slows down and settles. "Tied" and "died" rhyme, so the sound itself links the idea of being bound with the fact of death.
The final lines gather up the poem's key words. "Creatures" appears in the first line, where all creatures wait on us, and returns in the last, where we are "His creatures, and His foes." In that line humans are both made by God and opposed to him. "Created nature" subdues the animals for our benefit, but "their Creator, whom sin nor nature tied" is bound by neither law of nature nor guilt. The animals "brook subjection" to humans, and the Creator accepts something deeper, since he submits to death. The grammar adds to the effect. "Hath died" is held back to the very end of the sentence and the poem, so the surprise arrives on the last word, after a chain of qualifications.
The poem is significant because it takes a humble, observable fact, a horse pulling a cart or a bull dying under the blow, and uses it to make a theological point feel shocking again. Christian readers might have heard "God died for us" so often that it had stopped sounding strange. Donne restores the strangeness by starting from the animals, which are innocent, and then comparing them to a God who is more innocent still and who dies anyway. The poem moves from puzzlement to humility to astonishment in fourteen lines, and its argument works the way a good question does, by making the reader want the answer before it is given.