Robert Herrick, a seventeenth-century English poet, fits a whole cosmos into six lines. Music is addressed as a queen, a spell, a tamer of tigers, and only in the fifth line do we learn what the speaker actually wants. Everything before that is a build-up to a request: come down from the heavens and do to our souls what you already do to our ears.
The structure carries this idea. The poem is a single sentence, and its main verb, "Fall," is held back until line five. Four lines of praise pile up in clauses ("Thou that tam'st tigers…", "That strik'st a stillness…") before the command arrives. The sentence then does what it asks. It rises through "queen of heaven" and "chiming spheres," and the verb drops it back to earth. The rhymes are tidy couplets (spell/hell, rise/lullabies, spheres/ears), and each pair feels like a small closed door. The line lengths vary. The first four alternate between ten syllables and a shorter eight, so the second line of each couplet seems to cut off, almost like a hush. The last two lines are both full-length, which gives the final request room to settle.
The imagery works by extremes. Music is "queen of heaven," yet its power reaches all the way down to "hell," and the verb Herrick chooses is surprising: music "strik'st a stillness" there. Striking is a violent action, and what it produces is quiet, so music is shown winning by calming rather than overpowering. The next couplet widens the range again, from animals ("tigers") to weather ("fierce storms"). The old Orpheus legend of music taming wild beasts seems to lie behind this, though the poem never names it. The storms are said to "rise," and the phrase "soul-melting lullabies" turns them into restless children being hushed. The most violent things in the world are shown yielding to the gentlest kind of song.
The vocabulary of magic runs through the whole poem. Music is a "spell," then something that can "charm" and "enchant." "Care-charming" is a neat compound that suggests music charms worries away as a snake charmer lulls a snake. When "charm" returns in the last line, followed at once by "enchant'st," the effect is almost incantatory, as though the poem were a spell cast on music itself. The archaic verb endings ("strik'st," "tam'st," "enchant'st") add to this. They give the language a formal, ritual sound, and they squeeze the words into the metre.
The final couplet is the most carefully built. "Fall down, down, down" breaks up the smooth rhythm. The line stumbles into a cluster of heavy beats, and the repeated word makes us feel a slow descent. There is also a quiet echo here, since the storms "rise" in line three and music is told to "fall" in line five, as if the power we want is the one that brings turbulence down. "Chiming spheres" points to the ancient belief that the planets, set in great concentric spheres, make a harmony as they turn. Herrick asks that heavenly harmony to leave its distant orbit.
The last line holds the poem's central idea. Music already "enchant'st our ears," which is the physical, surface pleasure. What the speaker wants is for it to reach "our souls." Music is not just an enjoyable sound here. It is a force that could change what we are inside, with the ear only as a doorway. The title calls the poem "A Song," which suggests it was meant to be sung, so it would be a piece of music asking music to enter us.
The poem is worth reading because it does so much in so little space. In six lines it moves from praise to prayer, from the cosmic to the personal, and from sound to soul, and the grammar enacts the fall it requests. It also takes seriously the idea that music is more than decoration, that it might tame what is wild in us as it tames tigers and storms.