Eight lines, and almost every one is a plea for safety. The speakers are the "old wives" of the title, and they call on "Holy-Rood", the holy cross, as if it were a guardian who could be summoned by name: "come forth and shield." They ask for protection from three dangers: a "blast that burns by day", unnamed "sounds that us affright" in the night, and "hurtful fiends" who must be gone by dawn. The central idea is plain and human. Ordinary people in ordinary places feel exposed, and they reach for something larger than themselves to stand between them and what they cannot control.
The poem works like a map of space and time. "Us i' th' city and the field" covers every place a person might be, town or country. "Now and aye" stretches the request across all time. Then the day and night shifts are covered one after the other, with the burning blast by day and the "dead of dampish night". The final line sets the boundary, "the time the cocks first crow." Nothing is left out, and the prayer is a net thrown over the whole of a life. Even the dangers are paired: scorching heat against clammy damp, a sudden blast against a lingering dark.
The form suits that sense of completeness. The poem is four rhymed couplets (shield/field, aye/day, affright/night, fro/crow), and each one closes a thought with a click, like a latch. The lines are short, about seven syllables each, and they fall on a trochaic beat: HO-ly ROOD, come FORTH and SHIELD. Each line ends on a stressed syllable with no soft landing, so it stops firmly. The effect is chant-like and easy to memorise, closer to a charm than to a meditation. Judging by the form, it is made to be spoken aloud, perhaps again and again.
The word choices repay a closer look. The verbs are all commands: "come forth", "shield", "guard", "drive". There is no hedging and no elaborate politeness, only the direct tone of people who need help now. The word "us" appears four times, and the old-fashioned word order keeps pushing it forward: "Us i' th' city", "that us affright", "fiends us fro". The grammar itself huddles the speakers at the centre of the poem. "Fro", an archaic form of "from", gives the last couplet a worn, inherited feel, like words handed down.
The poem is also good at making fear feel domestic. "Dampish" is a small, homely word. It is not "dank" or "icy", and the mild "-ish" sounds like someone who has lain awake in that clammy dark many times. The "sounds" are never identified, which is cleverer than naming them, because the reader's imagination supplies something worse. Even the "fiends" are called "hurtful", a plain word more at home in a nursery than a sermon. The menace is real, but it is described in the language of people who simply do not want to be harmed.
The ending is the subtlest touch. In traditional belief, night spirits lose their power at the first crow of the cock. The speakers do not ask for the fiends to be destroyed, only driven off "by the time" morning comes. That is a modest, practical hope. The last word, "crow", also answers the frightening "sounds" of line five. One noise terrifies and another rescues, so the poem begins in fear and ends on a sound that promises light.
The poem matters because of how much it carries in so little space. Herrick, a seventeenth-century English poet, gives the old women's voices no narrator and no commentary, and the poem never winks at them. The title might suggest "old wives' tales" and superstition, but the verse treats their fear and their faith with quiet seriousness. Its mixture of a Christian symbol, night terrors and a folk sign of dawn suggests a world where these things sat comfortably together. In eight plain lines, it gives fear a shape and then gives it an edge.