Four lines, two couplets, and a miracle that has to be explained before the poem runs out of room. Crashaw's epigram, written on the multiplying of the loaves, does not retell the story of a crowd fed from almost nothing. It skips the people, the hillside and the baskets, and gives us only the bread, seen as a paradox. The central idea is that this bread breaks every rule of eating: the more it is consumed, the more of it there is, until the poem can say that "food itself is fed."
The opening words, "See here," sound like a showman at a market stall, or a teacher demonstrating something at the front of a room. The speaker is not meditating quietly but presenting evidence. The first thing he shows us is an "easy feast that knows no wound." Giving a feast the ability to be wounded is a bold choice. A loaf of bread is broken and bitten, and the poem treats that breaking as an injury, as if the bread were a body. In the second line hunger gets "teeth," so the scene becomes a small drama in which a predator bites and the victim "will needs be sound." "Will needs" means roughly "insists on being", and it gives the bread a stubborn will. "Sound" works two ways, meaning both unbroken and healthy, so the bread is whole and well even as it is devoured. "Easy" works two ways as well. It suggests a feast that costs no labour, and one that can be given away without effort or loss.
The second couplet shifts from the bread's resilience to its source. "A subtle harvest of unbounded bread" is the most compact line in the poem. A harvest implies fields, seasons and the slow work of growing, yet here it happens in an instant, in people's hands. "Subtle" suggests something fine, hidden and clever, a process too delicate to watch. "Unbounded" is the sharpest word, because a loaf is the most bounded of objects, with a crust, a shape and a limit. Crashaw sets that word beside "bread" and lets the contradiction stand.
Then the tone changes. "What would ye more?" is a challenge, perhaps to a doubter, perhaps to any reader who wants a bigger sign. The speaker is almost amused by the question. The answer comes in the final phrase, "Here food itself is fed." The line is built from short, plain words, and the repeated f sounds in "food," "itself" and "fed" make it chew over itself in a way that matches its meaning. Food normally feeds others. Here it becomes the one being fed, so the bread seems to grow by being eaten. The poem turns a gospel miracle into a riddle that closes on itself.
The form suits the idea. The lines are regular iambic pentameter in rhymed couplets (wound/sound, bread/fed), and the evenness makes the impossible claims sound calm and reasonable. The rhyme pairs matter too: "wound" lands on "sound," so injury is answered by wholeness within a single couplet, and "bread" is completed by "fed," so the thing and its purpose are joined. The poem is also an epigram, a form that sets up an expectation and delivers a sting in the final line, and the title places it among "Divine Epigrams," so brevity seems to be part of the design. The final line carries the sting by turning the whole description into one knotted phrase.
The poem is worth reading for how much it gets from so little. It makes a miracle feel like a verbal puzzle, so the reader has to grasp the wonder by working through the language, not by being told to feel awe. Readers who bring in the idea of a sacred meal may hear further meaning in "food itself is fed", but the text only asks us to look closely at one loaf and notice that it behaves like nothing else on the table.