Herrick announces a catastrophe, and he does it in the tone of a man who has mislaid some umbrellas. "I have lost, and lately, these / Many dainty mistresses." The verb is "lost," as if the women were possessions, and the adjective is "dainty," a word for pastries, not passions. Everything that follows plays on the gap between what the poem says (I am bereft) and how it sounds (I am rather enjoying this).
On the surface, the subject is the speaker's loss of seven women, each named and briefly praised, until he is left alone to mourn and perhaps die. The central idea is subtler. The poem laments the passing of beauty and pleasure, but it also shows a poet who turns even grief into a performance. Sorrow is something to be arranged, tallied and made charming.
The form carries this. The lines are short, seven syllables each, falling mostly into a light trochaic beat that stresses the first syllable and ends on a stressed one: "STATE-ly JU-lia, PRIME of ALL." Paired rhymes click shut like a series of small boxes: all/principal, skin/crystalline, choice/voice, wit/it. Even the first rhyme is faintly comic, because "these" has to chime with the looser, lighter "mistresses." A poem about heartbreak might stumble or sprawl. This one trips along, and the neatness makes the tears hard to believe.
The catalogue is the poem's main structure, and Herrick gives each woman a single distinguishing gift. Julia is "stately," Anthea has a skin "white, and heaven-like crystalline," Myrha is praised "for the lute and voice," and Corinna "for her wit, / And the graceful use of it." That last phrase is the neatest in the poem, since it praises not only intelligence but the elegance of deploying it. The women are admired almost as accomplishments, like items on a list of talents. The names themselves, such as Sapho and Electra, sound borrowed from classical literature. Judging by that texture, they read less like portraits of particular people than like figures in a poetic game, though the poem alone cannot settle that.
Then there is Perilla. After a line or two of careful praise for each of the others, she is squeezed into the middle of a line with no quality at all: "With Perilla:--All are gone." Perhaps the poet has run out of epithets, perhaps she was not memorable, or perhaps the joke is that the list is getting tiresome even to him. The dash and the sudden "All are gone" give the moment a quick, deflating snap, like a hand closing a ledger.
The ending turns the joke inward. "Only Herrick's left alone" is a striking line because the speaker refers to himself in the third person, as if standing a little apart and watching his own sad figure. Then comes the final couplet: "For to number sorrow by / Their departures hence, and die." Here "number" is worth pausing on. It means to count, which fits the poem's list-like habit, but "numbers" was also a common seventeenth-century word for verse, so the poet may be hinting that he is left to measure his sorrow in metre. The grief is not simply felt but counted, one departure at a time. The poem then ends on "die," the shortest and heaviest word in the final lines. Whether this is truly despairing or a theatrical flourish is left open, and that ambiguity is where the poem's charm lies.
The poem matters because it will not settle into a single mood. We can read it as a real lament for fleeting beauty, or as a gentle send-up of the lover's pose, or as both at once. Herrick was a clergyman as well as a poet, and there is a wry pleasure in picturing such a man composing this list, though the poem does not need that irony to work. What it offers on its own is a miniature of how poetry handles loss: by shaping it into something orderly, musical and a little mischievous, and so making it bearable.