Love poems usually measure a woman against the natural world: cheeks like roses, hair like gold, eyes like stars. Herrick does something cheekier. In "Art above Nature: to Julia" he looks at what Julia wears, the silk, the lace and the elaborately bound hair, and admits that it charms him more than any meadow or wood. The verdict arrives only in the last couplet: "mine eye and heart / Dotes less on nature than on art."
That delay is the poem's main structural trick. All eighteen lines form a single sentence, and its main clause, "I must confess," does not appear until line 17. Before that comes a string of subordinate clauses: "When I behold…", "And when I see…", "Then, when I see…", "Next, when those lawny films I see…". The "Then" and "Next" turn the poem into a guided tour, with the speaker's gaze moving from head-dress to lace to hair to flowing fabric. By the time the confession comes, the evidence has piled up so high that the conclusion feels inevitable, and slightly comic.
The form supports this. The poem runs in rhyming couplets of regular eight-syllable lines, with a neat, bouncing rhythm. Each rhyme (spread/head, dress/comeliness, bound/round) clicks shut like a clasp, which suits a poem about things carefully fastened and arranged. Some couplets spill over the line break, as when the lace "doth shew / The top, and the top-gallant too," and the sentence seems to climb as it goes. The last rhyme is the cleverest. "Heart" and "art" chime together, so the organ of feeling is bound to the principle of artifice in the poem's final sound.
The imagery keeps taking nature and rebuilding it out of manufactured things. The "forest" is made of "silken trees," and the flowers are "set in comeliness," arranged rather than grown. The lace headdress rises "like a pinnacle," as if it were a church spire, and then Herrick adds the "top-gallant," a nautical word for the highest sail on a ship's mast. The lace is now a building and a ship under full sail. This is deliberate exaggeration, and the humour is affectionate. The hair, too, is geometry: "an oval, square, or round," tied in knots more numerous than the speaker can describe "by tongue, or True-love tie." The poem's real subject is the sheer ingenuity of the arrangement, and the lover's knot sneaks romance in through the craftsmanship.
The most interesting phrase is "wild civility," used of the thin linen ("lawny films") that "play" as Julia moves. It is an oxymoron, wildness and good manners in one breath. The fabric looks free, but the freedom is designed. Herrick even uses the same phrase in his better-known "Delight in Disorder," where the studied carelessness of dress is also what charms him. Here art beats nature by imitating nature's looseness and improving on it. The verbs of temptation, "Alluring me, and tempting so," followed by "I must confess," give the ending the sound of a guilty admission, as though preferring ribbons to rivers were a small sin. That is a playful reading, drawn from the word choice alone. "Dotes" is a wonderfully unheroic verb too. It makes the speaker sound like a besotted fool, and he seems perfectly happy to be one.
It is worth noticing how little of Julia herself we see. There are no lips, no eyes and no complexion, only what has been done to her hair and what drapes around her. The poem could be read as a compliment to her taste or a joke at the lover's expense, and it probably works as both. What makes it significant is that it turns a standard of praise upside down. Instead of saying that the beloved is as lovely as nature, it says that human craft, with its pins, silks and knots, can be lovelier still. The poem also proves its own point. Its single suspended sentence and tidy couplets are as carefully made as the lace it admires, so the poet is quietly praising his own kind of workmanship along with Julia's.