Dew on a flower is an ordinary sight, but Robert Herrick looks at it and sees a nursery full of crying infants. Walking among primroses in the early morning, the speaker asks them, with mock-worried tenderness, "Why do ye weep, sweet babes?" The question is half joke, half puzzlement, because by his own reasoning the flowers have nothing to cry about. They were "but born / just as the modest morn / Teem'd her refreshing dew." They have never met "that shower / That mars a flower" or the "blasting wind," and they are not "worn with years" or "warp'd" like adults. Grief belongs to those with a past. Yet here are tears, shed "before ye have a tongue."
The second stanza turns detective. The speaker runs through guesses as a parent might with a fretful baby: is it lack of sleep, or a missing "childish lullaby"? Then the guesses drift from the nursery towards romance. Perhaps the primroses haven't yet seen "the violet," or received a kiss "From that Sweet-heart, to this." Judging by the context, the "Sweet-heart" is another flower, probably the violet. The playful list builds momentum so that the abrupt "--No, no" lands with a jolt. The speaker drops the game and gives the answer. The tears are a "lecture," a lesson that "things of greatest, so of meanest worth, / Conceived with grief are, and with tears brought forth."
That last line is the poem's central idea. Everything, grand or humble, begins in pain, and the primrose is simply honest about it. The vocabulary of birth has been there from the start. "Teem'd" can mean poured out, but it also carries the sense of bearing offspring, so the morning is a kind of mother and the dew her child. By the end, "conceived" and "brought forth" make the comparison explicit. A newborn's cry is its first language, a way of speaking before it has words, which is exactly what the speaker finds strange in the flowers.
The form quietly supports this. Each stanza has fourteen lines and the same rhyme pattern: a b c c b d d e e a f f g g. The repetition makes the second stanza feel like an answer to the first. In both, the lines start long and then shrink to two or three beats: "Speak grief in you," "Who were but born," "Ye droop and weep." These short lines read like catches of breath, as if the poem were hiccuping through its own small sobs, though that is an interpretation rather than a certainty. Both stanzas then settle into a pair of full-length lines (young/tongue, worth/forth). The first couplet states the oddity and the second explains it. The rhymes sometimes pair ideas too: "morn" with "born," "weep" with "sleep," and "shed" with "read," where the tears become something to be read like a text.
The word choice sets innocence against experience. The flowers are "babes," "younglings," "whimp'ring," "pretty," and even "orphans young," a phrase that adds a note of loneliness, as though the newborn is already on its own. Against these soft words stand harsh ones: "mars," "blasting," "warp'd." The word "warp'd" is the most telling, because the speaker includes himself ("as we"). Adults find the flowers' tears strange only because they have forgotten that sorrow comes first. "Lecture" is a wry choice too. It is a stiff, schoolroom word for a drop of dew, and it makes the flowers the teachers and the poet the student.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so small a space. A tiny natural detail becomes a general truth, and the move from teasing to seriousness is handled without losing charm. The ending is neither gloomy nor sentimental. The tears are not a warning of doom but a sign of how any life starts, a shared beginning for the "greatest" and the "meanest" alike.