Four lines, one miracle, and then its undoing. Richard Crashaw's epigram starts at the wedding at Cana, where, in John's Gospel, Christ turns water into wine, and it ends somewhere much darker, with that same wine dissolving into grief. The title tells us which story to remember. The poem then shows what happens to a gift once someone sets out to spoil it.
The central idea is that generosity can be turned against itself. Christ is addressed as "fair friend of life", and the wine is the sign of that friendship: sweetness, abundance, a celebration that never runs dry. But then comes "Thy foe". The poem never names him, though a reader would reasonably think of the devil. The foe answers with a miracle of his own and "distills" from the wine "the tears of wrath and strife". The implication is that drink breeds quarrels, anger and weeping, so the wine ends up as water again, now running from human eyes. The poem puts the blame on an enemy's meddling, not on the wine itself.
The construction mirrors this reversal. The poem is a single quatrain in tidy iambic pentameter, rhymed ABAB, and each line holds its ten syllables steadily. That calm regularity suits an epigram, a form that depends on a neat sting in the tail. The first line is the miracle and the other three are the counter-miracle, so the poem itself turns at "Thy foe", just as its subject does. The ends of the lines carry the argument too. "Life" and "strife" rhyme, setting Christ's gift against the foe's work in one sound. "Reign" and "again" close the poem, and in the older pronunciation of "again" they would have rhymed more fully than they do today. Either way, the final rhyme gives the sense of a process run backwards.
The best detail is how closely the two halves echo each other. Line one gives us "water turn'st to wine", with water first, then the verb, then wine, so the word order enacts the change. Line four reverses it: "turns wine to water back again." The verbs are almost the same, "turn'st" and "turns", as if the foe's work were a counterfeit of the real one, a forgery with the signature copied. The shape is almost a chiasmus, water-wine, wine-water. The phrase "back again" suggests the whole miracle has been rewound to its starting point, and the joy of Cana has been cancelled.
Individual words reward a slow look. "Arts" treats Christ's miracle as a kind of craft, "the sweet arts of thy reign", and "distills" gives the enemy a craft too. Distilling is slow and deliberate, a way of drawing an essence out of something, and here what is drawn out of the wine is bitter. The verb "cross" means to thwart, but in a religious poem it is hard not to hear the Cross behind it. That may be a pun or a coincidence of idiom, but it adds a shadow to a word that is otherwise merely about obstruction. Finally, "tears of wrath and strife" is a strange, compressed phrase. Tears are not usually made of anger, yet the genitive blends cause and effect, so that rage itself seems to become liquid.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in forty syllables. It takes one of the most joyful scenes in the Gospels and finds a shadow inside it without cancelling the original miracle. The wine remains a good gift, and the sorrow comes from what is done to it afterwards. It also shows that a witty conceit can carry a serious moral point. The cleverness of the mirrored lines is not decoration, because it makes the loss feel exact: the same two liquids, the same verb, run in the opposite direction.