Being mocked for your gray hair is nothing new, and Herrick's reply is one of the politest threats in English verse. A young woman has apparently rejected the speaker because he is going gray. He does not argue. He agrees ("I dare swear, that I am gray") and then shows her her own future. The central idea is that beauty is only on loan from time. She has "but your day," and anyone who despises age is simply arriving early at the same destination.
The opening lines set the tone. The first question, "Am I despised…?", sounds half wounded and half amused. The triple rhyme of *say*, *gray* and *day* snaps shut like a trap, and it ties together the two words that matter most. His hair is the color of evening, and her day is already running down. The short four-beat lines move briskly, like a retort delivered before she can answer. Even the title sounds legal: "objecting to him his gray hairs" reads like a charge in a courtroom, and the poem goes on to build a trial in which the defendant calls the witnesses.
The first witness is time itself, and its menace is in a small concession: "though long, it comes to pass." He admits the wait may be long, which makes the outcome feel not less certain but more. He can afford to be patient. Then comes the shift of imagery. His gray becomes her "frost and snow," which is a harsher image. Frost and snow are winter, and winter is what kills gardens. The next lines accordingly turn her face into a flowerbed. The "rose-bud in your cheek" and the "rare carnation" are colors of youthful blushing, and what remains is a bare "bed" where something once grew. Notice how the language piles up absences: "seek," "find no," "Nor any." The insult is subtle. He never calls her ugly. He just has her search her own face and come up empty.
The second witness is the mirror, which she must "question." Herrick calls it a "sincere crystal," meaning an honest one. The adjective is a quiet jab at all the flattering voices that might tell her otherwise. Glass, unlike a suitor, cannot be charmed.
The poem's best trick is saved for the ending, where the form changes. For eleven lines the couplets run steadily. Then line 12 stretches out, with a sighing "Ah!" and the dragging phrase "close in your chamber keeping." After that come two clipped lines, "It will be told / That you are old," and a final line that rhymes back with *keeping*: "By those true tears you're weeping." The short couplet of *told* and *old* sits inside the longer rhyme like a small room inside a larger one, which suits the shut-up chamber the poem describes. The word *told* also sounds like a bell. The passive voice matters too. Nobody says "you are old," not even the speaker. The mirror was only questioned, and the verdict comes from her own tears. They are "true," echoing the "sincere" glass, so that every honest witness in the poem agrees against her.
The tone of "Ah! then too late" is deliciously unclear. It could be real sympathy, or it could be relish dressed up as pity. Probably it is both, and that ambiguity keeps the poem from being merely spiteful. "Too late" also carries the old warning of seize-the-day poetry, that time spent in vanity cannot be recovered. Usually that advice is aimed at young women by hopeful lovers. Here the older man turns it into a rebuke.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. In fifteen lines Herrick takes a familiar theme and gives it a personal sting. He uses a simple scheme of rhyme and rhythm, a sequence of flower and winter images, and a last-minute tightening of the form, and he leaves the reader with something to think about. The speaker loses the argument about love but wins the argument about time, and he gets to look dignified while doing it.