Heartbreak, Herrick suggests, comes with its own official uniform. In sixteen lines he speaks directly to a willow tree, as if thanking a loyal friend, and names it the one plant that never abandons the abandoned. The central idea is a quiet paradox. The willow is "the best" thing for "all lost love" precisely because it offers so little. It cannot bring a lover back. It can only crown the grief, and the poem lets us feel both the comfort and the thinness of that gift.
The opening "Thou art" is an apostrophe, the old way of addressing something that cannot answer. It also sets up a small play on words in "the only true plant found." "True" means genuine, but it also means faithful, and that second sense stings in a poem about people who have been treated unfaithfully. Herrick never describes the lovers who did the leaving. Their cruelty is felt only as an absence, in the phrase "distrest / And left of love." Even the rhyme joins the two ideas: "found" chimes with "crown'd," so discovering the plant and crowning the mourners happen in the same sound.
The second stanza sets two plants against each other. The rose is the flower of love, and when it is "dead / Or laid aside forlorn," the willow takes its place on the head. The phrase "laid aside forlorn" is pleasingly ambiguous, since it could describe the discarded rose or the discarded lover. The garlands are "Bedew'd with tears," and the word suits a tree associated with drooping branches. Dew and tears blur together, so the wreath looks as damp and heavy as the feeling behind it.
The third stanza is the sharpest. Neglect is called "the lover's bane," and a bane is a poison, so neglect is made out to be lethal as well as sad. Then comes the bitter irony of "Poor maids rewarded be." Rewarded for what? The answer arrives in the next line, where the language shifts to accounting: "their only gain / Is but a wreath." Love is lost, a wreath is gained, and the ledger is grimly balanced. The stanza also narrows to "maids" alone, and the poem seems here to dwell on the woman left unregarded, though the other stanzas share the sorrow between "young men and maids."
The last stanza moves from decoration to shelter. After the garland comes the tree's "cooling shade," which is a gentle contrast with the heat usually attached to passion. The mourners are "weary of the light," as though the daytime world of happy couples has become too bright to bear, so they retreat to weep "out the night." "Weep out" is a nicely chosen phrase. It suggests crying until the night is used up, and it also echoes the tree's own drooping, weeping shape. The compounds "love-spent" and "love-sick" press the lovers' exhaustion into single words, and by now youth and maid are mirrored as equals in sorrow.
The form supports this mood. Each stanza alternates eight-syllable and six-syllable lines, and the rhymes run ABAB. The short lines act like sighs after the longer ones: "Is but a wreath from thee," "Come to weep out the night." Almost every line completes its thought, so each stanza feels neatly finished, like a garland closed into a ring. The vocabulary is mostly short and plain, which keeps the tone tender rather than theatrical. The poem ends on "night," rhymed with "light," so the final image is of darkness the lovers must sit through.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does with how little. Herrick, a seventeenth-century English poet, takes the willow as a familiar emblem of forsaken love and turns it into a small drama of consolation. There are no grand declarations, only a tree, a wreath and a long night. The slightly wry words "rewarded" and "gain" stop the sympathy from becoming sentimental. The willow is faithful and kind, but the poem never pretends it is enough.