A man walks among myrtles, a plant traditionally sacred to Venus, and finds himself in conversation with Love and with his own sighs. The setup is playful, as if his unhappiness has grown into company. His question is simple: where can he find his Shepherdess? Love's answer is brisk and slightly rude ("Thou fool"), because she is already everywhere, "in every thing that's sweet." The poem then turns into a small treasure hunt. Her lip and cheek are in the carnation, her "curious eye" in the pansy, and her blood in the peach bloom and rosebud, where it "waves" like a streamer. "Curious" here probably carries its older sense of finely made, and "enamell'd" suggests a glossy, crafted surface. Even in his flower-gazing the speaker is half-admiring something that looks like art.
The comedy and the sadness both start when the speaker says "'Tis true" and goes to pick them. He wants "to make of parts an union," assembling a woman from her scattered likenesses. The line is oddly clinical, and the phrase "one by one" slows him into a patient, almost shopping-list rhythm. Then comes the shock: "But on a sudden all were gone." It is the plainest line in the poem, mostly one-syllable words with nothing to cushion it. The sound pattern helps. Four lines in a row share one rhyme: "thereupon," "one by one," "union," "gone." Union grows out of the same root as one, so the rhyme seems to promise completion, and then "gone" closes the sequence on loss.
Love's explanation reverses what the speaker thought he was doing. The vanished flowers are "the true resemblances of thee," meaning the speaker, not the Shepherdess. The flowers looked like her, but what they actually resemble is his joys and hopes, which "must die" and "wither." The poem has quietly changed its subject. It begins as a hunt for her and ends as a warning to him. She never appears, and the only things we meet are her borrowed features and his hopes. The title, which dresses a named woman in a pastoral name, makes the same point from the outside: she is a figure in a game of disguises, always one step removed.
The form suits that lightness. The poem runs in quick, eight-syllable lines, mostly rhymed in couplets, with the swing of a nursery rhyme. That bounce makes the dialogue feel like a quarrel between old friends, and it also makes the ending bite, because the tune keeps going while the meaning drops away. One awkward moment is worth noticing: "And in the turning of an eye" hangs oddly on the end of the line before. It reads as a blink, the speed with which joy goes. It also echoes the earlier "curious eye" in the pansy, so the eye that was a lovely detail becomes a measure of how fast things disappear. The last couplet rhymes "wither" with "together," a two-syllable ending that trails off like a sigh. Its final phrase, "short sweets here knit together," returns to the language of joining, but now what is joined is brief.
The poem is also a quiet comment on desire. Plucking is the gesture of possession, and here it is exactly what destroys the thing wanted. The beauty was there to be seen and could not be collected. Herrick is remembered for short poems that look at flowers and the speed of time, and "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" is the best known of them. That poem urges action while beauty lasts. This one is gentler and more rueful, because the speaker acts and still loses everything.
That is what makes it worth reading. In twenty-two lines it moves from compliment to a small disappointment, and Love's last words stop being flattery and become a verdict on the speaker's own hopes. A poem that starts as a pretty list of flowers ends by admitting that the thing you want most may be the thing you spoil by reaching for it.