Praise is rarely this suspicious. Robert Herrick's sixteen lines keep insisting that women are blameless, and then hand over the evidence against them, one item at a time. "No fault in women" comes back six times like a stuck refrain, and each time a fault follows: pretending to refuse what they most want, taking forever to dress, painting the face, padding the figure, living under a cloud of suspicion. The central idea is irony. The speaker means the opposite of what he says, and the fun lies in watching each "no fault" turn into a charge.
The faults have something in common: each is a gap between appearance and reality. The opening couplet is about speech and desire, with women who "refuse / The offer which they most would chuse," saying no while meaning yes. The poem then moves to the body's surface. Cheeks receive "the tincture of vermilion" and "a dye / Of white, where Nature doth deny." The word choice is playful. "Tincture" and "vermilion" sound like a painter's or apothecary's stock, and "dye" belongs to cloth, not skin, so the face becomes a material to be treated. Nature is cast as a stingy lender whom women overrule. Next comes padding: women "make show / Of largeness, when they're nothing so," because "the outside swells / With inward buckram, little else." Buckram is stiffened fabric, so the joke is that what looks like a body is mostly lining. "Little else" is the cruellest phrase in the poem, a flat shrug at the end of the line.
There is a neat trap here. The speaker accuses women of saying one thing and meaning another, yet he does exactly that himself. His "no fault" is a respectable surface with something quite different stuffed inside. Whether Herrick intended this self-mockery we can't know, but it makes the poem more interesting than a plain complaint.
The form supports the wit. Nearly every line is a short, brisk beat of about eight syllables, so "How tedious they are in their dress" trips along like conversation. The rhymes (refuse/chuse, dye/deny, show/so) land with the snap of a punchline, and each couplet shuts like a door. The dashes break the poem into uneven blocks of two lines, two, four, four, two and two. The longest blocks go to cosmetics and padding, the two faults of surface, as if the speaker lingers over what amuses him most. Enjambment ("to lay on / The tincture", "though they be / But seldom from suspicion free") lets sentences spill over the line breaks, giving the voice a buttonholing, gossipy ease. Even the word "tedious" is mild, closer to a yawn than an outburst. The tone is teasing, not furious.
The last couplet is the sharpest. The poem widens from "women" to "womankind at all," as if issuing a general ruling, then adds a condition: "If they but slip, and never fall." That "if" quietly undoes the whole "no fault" claim, since it admits there is something that would count as a fault. The wordplay is clever. A slip is a small stumble and a fall is a serious one, and "fall" carries a hint of moral failure. Women may stumble, it seems, so long as they never hit the ground. The poem ends on "fall," the very thing the speaker most fears, and the word leaves a sting.
The poem is worth reading because it packs so much into so little. Herrick was a seventeenth-century English poet known for short, polished poems, and this one shows how irony can do the work of a long argument. Sixteen lines build a joke, spring a trap and turn it back on the joker. It also gives modern readers something to push against. The faults are familiar stereotypes seen through a male speaker's eyes, and one could ask whether women who paint and pad are really the problem, or whether the problem is a world that judges them by their surfaces. The poem never asks that question itself, but its obsession with appearances makes it easy for us to ask.