Herrick's "Matins, or Morning Prayer" gives instructions for the first minutes after waking. The speaker addresses the reader as "thou" and lists what to do: cross yourself, wash your heart, kneel at the altar, and send your soul up like incense. The central idea is that prayer is mostly preparation, an inner cleansing that brings a person's daily actions into line with their proper purposes. The poem never quotes a single word of prayer. Everything in it is gesture, posture and condition, as if being ready matters more than anything said.
The form suits that practical tone. Four rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter give the poem a measured, orderly feel, and the sequence words "First," "then," "Next" make it read like a set of directions for a ceremony. The rhymes are tidy: "rise" with "sacrifice," "bring" with "every thing," "thence" with "frankincense," "sweet" with "meet." The third pair is the most satisfying. "Frankincense" is a longer, softer word than "thence," so the couplet seems to trail off upward like the smoke it describes.
The poem's best-known trick is in line four: "Pure hands, pure habits, pure, pure every thing." The word "pure" appears four times, and the doubled "pure, pure" breaks the smooth rhythm so that stresses pile up. It sounds like someone scrubbing a stain and then stepping back to check for any spot left. The line also moves from inside to outside. The heart is washed "in innocence," and then purity spreads to hands, then to "habits." That last word may mean customs and routines, and in seventeenth-century English it could also mean clothing. Either way, the poem treats goodness as something built from small, repeated, visible things. The "virgin morning" in the first line sets this up by presenting the day as untouched, something to be kept clean rather than repaired later.
The imagery then changes. The first four lines are plain and moral, and the last four become physical and sensory. "Give up thy soul in clouds of frankincense" is a striking instruction, because the soul itself is the offering, not just the smoke. The word "sacrifice" in line two prepares for this, and the worshipper ends up acting as both priest and gift. The next line adds "golden censers fill'd with odours sweet," the most luxurious phrase in the poem. After all that insistence on purity, the reward is imagined as something you can smell and see. It suggests that the spiritual life, for Herrick, is not grey or joyless.
A change of grammar marks the shift. Up to line six the verbs are commands ("come," "wash," "bring," "kneel," "give"). Then the final couplet turns to "shall," a promise. The incense "Shall make thy actions with their ends to meet." The word "ends" has a double meaning. It most obviously means aims or purposes, so that what you do and what you are meant to do finally coincide. The poem also leaves room for a larger sense of "ends" as outcomes, even the final end of a life, though that reading is an inference. Both fit the idea that a morning ritual can set the direction for everything after it, the way a traveller checks a compass before leaving. The verb "meet" does the work of the whole couplet. Prayer closes the gap between intention and action.
Herrick was a clergyman as well as a poet, and the liturgical vocabulary here ("matins," "altar," "censers," "crossing thyself") is the language of worship, handled with ease. What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into eight lines. It is instruction, ritual and promise at once, and it avoids sermonising by letting images do the persuading. The repeated "pure" gives it force, and the rising incense gives it beauty. Its quiet argument is that a good day begins with a decision about what kind of person will walk into it, and that this decision is made with the body as well as the mind: with washed hands, bent knees and a deliberate order of steps. A modern reader may not share the faith behind it, but the idea that how you begin shapes what follows still holds up.