Ben Jonson's speaker asks for almost nothing, and that is the trick. "Drink to me only with thine eyes" sounds like a modest request, a toast made without glasses or wine. Within eight lines, though, he has declared that her glance, or even the trace of a kiss left on a cup, would satisfy him more than the drink of the gods. The poem is a compliment built so lightly that you barely notice how huge it is.
The first stanza moves by a neat logic of exchange. She toasts with her eyes; he will "pledge with mine", a verb that means both to drink a toast and to promise himself. Then the demands shrink further: a kiss left "but in the cup" and he'll "not look for wine". At line five the tone deepens. The "thirst that from the soul doth rise" asks for "a drink divine", so what he longs for is no longer physical. The "But" in line seven is the hinge. Jonson sets up the grandest drink imaginable, the nectar of Jove, only to wave it away: "I would not change for thine." The final "thine" never says what it refers to, whether her eyes, her kiss or her cup, so it comes to stand for everything about her.
The form supports this lightness. Long lines of four beats alternate with shorter lines of three, so each short line seems to answer the one before, like the reply to a toast. The rhyme scheme is ABCBABCB, and both stanzas follow it exactly. In the first, one sound chimes four times: "mine", "wine", "divine", "thine". Having "mine" and "thine" sit near the start and at the very end of the stanza quietly acts out the mutual exchange it describes. The diction is plain and mostly one syllable, which makes the extravagant claims feel spoken from the heart rather than manufactured.
The second stanza turns from argument to a little story. The speaker sent a "rosy wreath", but insists he did it "Not so much honouring thee / As giving it a hope, that there / It could not withered be." This is flattery disguised as modesty. The gift was for the flowers' sake, he says, in the hope that near her they could never fade. Her response is tiny: she "only" breathes on the wreath and sends it back. That "only" echoes the poem's first line, and "breathe" is a near-rhyme for "wreath", so the gesture and the object are tied together by sound. The rhyme on "thee", "be", "me" and "thee" also links beloved, flower and lover.
What follows is impossible. A cut wreath now "grows, and smells", and its scent belongs "Not of itself, but thee." The "I swear" is a wink. He knows we won't quite believe him, and the playfulness is part of the charm. The poem ends on "thee", so she gets the last word of the poem, as she is the source of everything in it.
Both stanzas work in the same way. Each gives a very small action from her (a look, a breath) and shows an ordinary thing transformed by it: wine becomes unnecessary, and a dying wreath becomes alive and fragrant. There is also a pleasing ambiguity in the wreath's return. She might be accepting his gift or politely handing it back. But the speaker turns it into a keepsake carrying her scent, so even a possible refusal becomes a kind of closeness.
The poem's lasting appeal comes from this balance of restraint and exaggeration. Love poems of any age risk sounding gushing, but this one stays cool, witty and exact, and its two matching stanzas are shaped so well that they sing easily. That suits a poem that calls itself a song, and it has indeed lived on as one. Its central claim is that a lover can make the world seem different without grand gestures, and that the person in love is the one who notices it.