Twelve words are enough for Robert Herrick to define wrinkles, and the definition is not kind. Wrinkles, he says, are exactly "beauty turn'd to sourness". The poem is a miniature argument about what time does to a face, and it makes its case in a single sentence that refuses to finish until the last syllable.
That sentence is built on suspense. "Wrinkles no more are, or no less" sounds like a careful bookkeeper's phrase, as if the speaker were weighing the matter and promising neither to exaggerate nor to soften it. The commas make the line hesitate, and the verb "are" is pushed awkwardly into the middle of the phrase. We then have to wait for the next line, where "Than" finally delivers the comparison. The line break works like a held breath: we expect a measured, perhaps gentle, equivalence, and what arrives is "sourness". The calm tone of the first line makes the second land harder.
The key image is a taste, and it is worth asking why Herrick chose it. Beauty is usually described through sight, so a word from the tongue comes as a jolt. "Turn'd" suggests something spoiling, and judging by the imagery, we might think of milk or wine going off, though the poem never says so. A sour taste also makes the mouth pucker, and puckering is exactly what wrinkles look like. The metaphor therefore does double work. It names a decay, and it describes the physical look of the thing it names. Even the sound of "wrinkles" helps, since its clustered consonants, with that crinkling "-nkl", seem to fold the word in on itself.
The word "turn'd" is also doing quiet work. It is passive, with no one doing the turning, so the agent has to come from somewhere else. The title as given, "Time was upon", reads like the start of a sentence cut short, and it seems to supply the missing actor. Time is never named in the two lines themselves, but it hovers behind the verb. This is an inference from the title, but it fits: the poem describes the result and leaves the cause unspoken.
The sound pattern carries a small joke at beauty's expense. The first line has eight syllables and ends on the firm, stressed "less". The second has only seven and ends on "sourness", where the stress falls on "sour" and the final "-ness" fades away. The two lines rhyme, but the rhyme is slightly off, because a stressed syllable is matched with an unstressed one. The couplet does not close with a neat click. It trails away, a little deflated, which is rather how the poem says beauty ends. The repeated *s* sounds in "wrinkles", "less" and "sourness" add a faint hiss, almost a sneer.
What is the tone, then? The poem gives few clues. There is no "I" and no "you", no pity and no sermon, only a definition delivered with cool confidence. It could be read as a mocking jab or as a rueful warning, and the poem does not choose between them. There is also a more generous reading. If wrinkles are beauty *turned*, rather than beauty destroyed, then they are still made of the same material. The loss is a transformation, and the old beauty is the very thing that has soured.
The poem's significance lies in this compression. Herrick was a seventeenth-century English poet, and the brief, polished poem of a line or two, where a single image carries the whole argument, suits the epigram form well. The poem also echoes an old poetic habit of reminding readers that looks do not last and that time spoils what it once gave. Here the reminder takes up barely a breath. A longer poem might lament or persuade, but this one simply states, and its bluntness is why it stays in the mind. After two lines, it is hard to look at a wrinkle and not think of that puckered mouth.