Eight lines, one question and one answer: that is all Robert Herrick needs to try to comfort a grieving mother. The title tells us the speaker is addressing Lady Crewe after the death of her child, and the poem's central idea is that this death is not an ending but a pause. The child is asleep, then a flower hidden underground, waiting for spring. The poem asks the mother to see her loss in the rhythm of nature, where what disappears returns.
The opening question is a delicate piece of work. "Why, Madam, will ye longer weep" is courteous, since "Madam" keeps the formal distance proper to addressing a lady. Yet it is also slightly bold, because "longer" implies the weeping has already gone on for a while and the speaker thinks it should stop. The rest of the poem justifies that nerve. The archaic "Whenas" simply means "when", but it gives the line a gentle, old-fashioned sound, and "lull'd asleep" nearly sings, its soft l and s sounds echoing a lullaby. Death has been replaced by the nursery. The word itself is kept away until line six, where it appears only to be denied.
The first stanza also hints at what came before. "Those pains it lately felt before" suggests, judging by the wording, that the child had been suffering. The poem then offers the thin comfort that "feels now no more." The tender aside "pretty child" is almost a glance toward the cradle, a moment where the speaker stops addressing the mother and looks at the baby himself.
The second stanza opens with silence: "All now is silent; groans are fled." Groans are personified as creatures running from the room, and the semicolon makes a small stop after them. Then comes the line the poem turns on: "Your child lies still, yet is not dead." It is made almost entirely of one-syllable words, flat and plain, and it contradicts what the mother can see with her own eyes. "Still" means motionless, but the "yet" immediately pushes against it. The line reads as a statement of faith as much as a fact. The pairing of "fled" with "dead" is worth noticing too. The rhyme forces the forbidden word into the very place where the poem is denying it.
The final couplet gives the denial its image: "But rather like a flower hid here, / To spring again another year." The flower is not dead but dormant, and "hid here" keeps it close, in the ground nearby, not somewhere remote. "Spring" does double duty as a verb and a season, so that rising and the time of year are one idea. The rhyme of "here" with "year" links place to time, setting the child's absence inside a calendar of returning seasons. The poem ends on this promise, with no more weeping and no further argument.
The form supports the message. The lines are regular eight-syllable iambic couplets, light and quick, which is an unusual pace for a poem about a dead child. The rhymes (weep/asleep, more/before, fled/dead, here/year) close neatly each time, like a door being shut softly. The tidiness is part of the consolation, because the poem sounds ordered and calm even though grief is not.
Whether the poem fully convinces is another question, and one worth discussing in class. Telling a mother to stop crying could easily sound cold, and the poem's gentleness depends on its word choices: "lull'd", "pretty", "hid". Behind the flower image the Christian idea of resurrection seems to hover, which would suit a poet who was an English clergyman, though the poem never states it and relies on a single natural picture instead of doctrine. That restraint is its strength. In so few lines, Herrick turns the most painful fact imaginable into something small, green and patient, and offers it to the mother as a reason to hope.