Six short lines are all Robert Herrick needs to bury a child, and what stands out is how quietly he does it. The title states the fact, "a child that died", and the poem itself never says the word. There is no "dead" and no "grave", and no sermon about heaven or fate. Instead we get a flower, a sleeper and a patch of earth, and the poem asks us to treat all three gently.
The central idea is that the right response to a very young death is tenderness, not lament. The speaker talks like an epitaph, beginning "Here she lies", the way a gravestone might. But he moves quickly from describing to asking, and the last two lines turn into a request: "Give her strewings, but not stir / The earth, that lightly covers her." "Strewings" are the flowers or herbs scattered over a grave. The request is double, since mourners are told both to give something and to hold back. Add flowers, but do not disturb the ground. The reader goes from onlooker to someone with a task, and the task is to be careful.
The imagery makes the child seem both fragile and newly made. "A pretty bud" is a flower that has not opened, so the image suggests a life that had hardly begun. The next line adds a harder note: "Lately made of flesh and blood." The phrase is plain and bodily, a reminder that the bud was a real child. "Lately made" sounds as if she had only just been put together, which makes her loss feel even more sudden. Then comes the poem's most delicate moment: she "fell fast asleep, / As her little eyes did peep." The word "peep" suggests the first, hesitant glance of a newborn, or a bud beginning to split. The rhyme of "asleep" with "peep" brings the two ends of her short life almost into the same moment. Her eyes had barely opened before they closed. The grammar adds to this, because "as soon… as" makes the time between waking and sleeping nearly vanish.
The sound of the poem supports its gentleness. The lines are short, with four beats each, and they lean toward a falling rhythm: HERE she LIES, a PRET-ty BUD. Each line ends on a stressed syllable, which gives a small, firm click, as if a lid were closing. The rhymes come in three tidy couplets (bud/blood, asleep/peep, stir/her), and the neatness feels like a way of holding steady when emotion could overflow. Nearly every word is a single syllable. That plainness suits a child's size and also stops the poet from sounding grand about something that can't be improved by grandness.
Sound patterns keep the mood soft. The l-sounds of "lies", "lately", "little" and "lightly" run through the poem like a lullaby, and "flesh", "fell" and "fast" give the sleep a quick drop. "Lightly" is the best choice in the whole piece because it works two ways. The earth should be light in weight, so that it will not press on so small a body. It should also be touched lightly by the living, who must not dig or disturb. An old wish in Roman epitaphs asked that the earth might lie light on the dead, and Herrick's word carries that tender superstition without any show of learning.
The poem's significance lies in this restraint. It shows that a few well-chosen images can say what a long elegy might smother. The dash before the last couplet works almost like a lowered voice, and the final instruction carries the feeling that the earlier lines held back. Some poems about death try to explain it. This one doesn't try, and asks only that we be careful where we step. For a modern reader that is still moving, because it treats grief as something practical and quiet, a matter of what we do with our hands and how softly we do it.