Time is the rider that breaks youth.

Herbert’s line personifies Time as a rider who “breaks” youth the way a horse-breaker tames a spirited animal: through relentless pressure, training, and wear. The image compresses a familiar moral insight—youthful vigor and freedom are gradually disciplined by aging, experience, and mortality—into a single, forceful metaphor. It also implies inevitability: Time is not merely a backdrop but an active agent that subdues the body and tempers the will. In Herbert’s devotional-poetic world, such a thought typically points beyond mere lament toward humility and the recognition that human strength is transient, urging the reader to value what endures over what fades.