Grief in this poem is a falling thing, and the surprise is how quickly it gets back up. The title promises a consolation for a brother's death, and the poem is addressed to Endymion Porter. Yet the speaker who mourns is mostly Herrick himself: "I have lost / E'en all almost." Judging by the text, the poem is less about the dead brother than about what a living friend can do for someone in despair. Porter is the "chief preserver," and the poem is Herrick's way of saying so. The opening stanza even addresses "Herrick" by name, as if a consoling friend, or Herrick's own steadier self, is talking him round before he answers back in stanza two.
The form does a lot of this work. Each stanza has seven lines and rhymes *aabbccc*, but the line lengths are uneven. The second line of every stanza shrinks to a few syllables ("Herrick, as yet"; "E'en all almost"; "In death I thrive"; "Which makes me stand"), and the sixth line shrinks again ("As dead within the west"; "Whereon my vine did crawl"). Each short line works like a caught breath or a stumble. The stanza then recovers in a long closing line that stretches out to ten syllables, as with "Yet, the next morn, regild the fragrant east." The meter is easy and conversational, so the poem sounds like someone talking himself back to health rather than declaiming.
The imagery keeps changing as the mood does. Stanza one is all sky: suns set, a "far-drawn hemisphere" that frowns, then a morning that "regilds" the east. Sunset becomes a promise, because the sun only seems "dead within the west." In stanza two the metaphors pile up in despair. His sight has sunk, his sun has set, and "the loom of life" is undone, as if a weaving were pulled apart thread by thread. Then comes the most homely picture, the elm, the prop and the "shelt'ring wall / Whereon my vine did crawl." Herrick is the vine, and its support has been "blown down." The line ends flatly on "the old stock fall," with nothing left to cushion it.
The turn comes with the phoenix. "In death I thrive," Herrick says, since Porter is alive to rescue him, and he rises "from out my nard and fun'ral fire." The word "prune" is the cleverest choice in the poem. A bird prunes its feathers, and a gardener prunes a vine, so Herrick can be preening his "feathered youth" and trimming his vine in the same breath. The two images, mythical bird and garden plant, fuse into one. He also looks back at his low point with a kind of wonder: "I do mar'l how I could die / When I had thee... by." Despair now seems almost absurd, because help was standing beside him all along.
Stanza four opens with "I'm up, I'm up," which answers the earlier "Now, now blown down." In both, the repeated word makes the moment feel immediate, but the direction has reversed. The last lines turn to the language of debt and wine. Thanks are paid like a bill, and the poem suggests that gratitude is not an ending but an investment. Whoever thanks "the gen'rous vine / Invites fresh grapes to fill his press with wine." There is a gentle irony here, since the vine was the image of the needy one in stanza two and has now become the image of generosity.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses the usual elegy. It begins in loss but never lingers there, and it ends by making thankfulness into something productive. It also moves through its pictures of sunset, weaving, vine and phoenix without letting any one of them harden into cliché, because each is dropped just as it has done its job. The result is a compact piece of thinking about how a friendship can carry someone through grief.