But ne'er the rose without the thorn.

Herrick’s line crystallizes a proverbial truth: beauty, pleasure, or reward is rarely found without some accompanying pain, risk, or cost. The rose stands for what is desirable—love, youth, delight, worldly success—while the thorn represents the inevitable drawbacks that attend it. In Herrick’s lyric world, where he repeatedly urges readers to seize fleeting joys (“carpe diem”), the reminder is not purely pessimistic; it can be read as a counsel to accept life’s mixed conditions. The line’s compact antithesis helps explain its afterlife as a general maxim about the inseparability of sweetness and suffering.