Four months, four women, and one steadily rising bank balance: Herrick's little poem works like a ledger of the year's early riches. Each month arrives in turn, and each is declared richer than the last. April waters the ground, May dresses it, June brings out the jewels, and July outdoes all three of her predecessors put together. The poem is about the pleasure of abundance, and its central idea is that early summer is an accumulation, a treasure that grows as it goes.
The construction is tidy to the point of playfulness. There are eight lines, four rhyming couplets (showers/flowers, May/array, more/before, she/three), and one month to each couplet. Every rhyme closes a small step, so the poem moves like someone laying cards on a table one by one. The line is short and light, roughly eight syllables, mostly iambic: "Then AFter HER comes SMILing MAY" skips along with nursery-rhyme ease. Herrick varies it just enough to keep it alive. "Opens the way for early flowers" begins with a stress on "Opens," so April's line starts with a little push, like a door being shoved wide. In "Then, lastly, July comes, and she," the rhythm only works if July is stressed on its second syllable, "ju-LY," so the name falls into place like a final footstep.
The poem also counts out loud. "First," "Then," "Next," "lastly" mark the order, and the comparisons grow larger each time. May is "more rich" than April, June brings more than "those two that went before," and July beats "all those three." The repeated word "more" drives the whole poem forward, and by the end the reader is doing sums.
The months are personified as women, and the poem frames them with care. April and July are the only months given the explicit pronoun "she," so the sequence opens and closes on the same word. The verbs change as well. April "opens the way," like a doorkeeper. May "comes" smiling, like a guest. June "enters," which suggests a procession. July "brings in," a phrase that could mean gathering a harvest or collecting income. By the end the calendar feels like a pageant moving through the garden.
The most interesting thread is the vocabulary of value, which quietly rises through the poem. It starts in the soft, natural world of "mellow showers" and "early flowers." "Mellow" is a word we usually apply to ripe fruit or smooth wine, so even the rain tastes of ripeness. Then comes "array," which means finery or clothing, so the flowers have become fabric. June brings "gems," and the word may carry a double meaning, since its Latin root *gemma* could mean either a jewel or a bud. By the last line we are in the language of money: "wealth." Blossom turns into cloth, then jewellery, then riches. The poem raises the value of its images along with the quantity, and "brings us more" is the one moment where the reader is included, as if the gifts were meant for us.
What the poem leaves out is just as telling. Herrick is also remembered for poems that urge readers to seize the day before time runs out, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" among them. Here the calendar stops at July, at the peak, and nothing looks beyond it. There is no fading, no warning, no autumn waiting in the wings. Judging by the text, the effect is pure celebration with the shadow deliberately held back.
That restraint is part of what makes the poem worth reading. It is a miniature, but a well-made one, showing how much shape and feeling can fit into eight plain lines. It has no elaborate metaphors and no difficult words, just ordinal numbers, simple verbs and a few carefully escalating nouns. Its pleasure comes from the sense of a year opening like a treasure chest, one lid at a time, with the best saved for last.