Robert Herrick gives his speaker a plan that sounds almost military. He will send a rose as his messenger, have it bind the woman he loves, and threaten to chain her as she has chained him. By the final line the plan has collapsed, and the collapse is the whole point. What looks like a threat is really a confession.
The first two stanzas build the speaker's case. The rose is told to "bind my Love" with other flowers, and the grievance comes out in the last line of the stanza: she "has fetter'd me." Her freedom, as he sees it, has been paid for with his captivity, so it is time to even things up. Yet every instrument of punishment he lists is decorative. There are garlands, "bands / Of pearl and gold," and "myrtle rods," and myrtle is a plant traditionally linked with Venus, the goddess of love. Even the stated limit of his violence, "to tame, though not to kill," is mild. He wants to tame her as one tames a wild creature, and he is quick to say he won't hurt her. These are the threats of someone who cannot imagine harming the person he is threatening.
The form suits this lightness. The poem is labelled a song, and it behaves like one. Each of the three stanzas has five short lines of mostly seven syllables, with a falling, trochaic lilt ("Tell her, too, she must not be"). The rhyme scheme is aabbb: a pair of lines, then a run of three. Those triple rhymes (be / free / me, then still / will / kill, then fly / eye / I) give each stanza a tumbling, gathering close, as though the speaker is warming to his own bluster. Rhyme also does quiet work in the last stanza, where "eye" and "I" sound identical. The woman who looks and the man who burns are tied together in a single sound, and the pairing sets up the closing joke.
That joke depends on a sudden turn. In the third stanza the speaker blesses the rose, begins to repeat his message, and stops himself: "but do not so!" It is the only line broken by dashes and an exclamation mark, as if he has just heard what he is about to do. His fear is that "a handsome anger" will "fly / Like a lightning from her eye." The word "handsome" matters here. In the period it could mean fine or becoming, so even her wrath is something he admires. The lightning flash is an old convention in love poetry, where the lady's eyes are all fire and wound, and Herrick treats it with a straight face. The rose will be "burn[ed] up," as a real flower would shrivel in a real blaze.
The last four words carry the sting: "as well as I." Until then the speaker has presented himself as the one who plans to bind and tame. The closing phrase admits he has already been burned and that she holds all the power. The would-be captor remains the captive, and he knows it. His bravado exists only to be taken back.
The poem matters because it gets so much drama out of so little space. In fifteen lines there is a command, an escalation, a retraction and an admission. It also shows Herrick, a seventeenth-century English poet who made a speciality of small, polished lyrics, playing with a familiar convention. The lover enslaved by a cruel mistress is an old figure, but here the pose is deflated with a smile. The rose is also given an unusual job. It is more often a symbol of beauty and brief life (Herrick's "Gather ye rosebuds" is the best-known example), but here it is a messenger and a possible casualty, a little go-between who might pay for its master's nerve. The poem is funny, but the comedy rests on something real. The speaker can only say how much he feels by pretending he doesn't, and by running out of courage just before the end.