Dryden gives his speaker no time to hesitate. The poem opens with a slammed door, "Farewell, ungrateful traitor!", and the voice behind it is a woman's. The poem is by a man, so this is a role he writes for her, though the bitterness is convincing. She turns almost at once from her own case to everyone's: "Let never injur'd woman / Believe a man again." The injury is personal, but she wants it to serve as a warning.
The central idea is an imbalance of time. In the first stanza she says that "The pleasure of possessing / Surpasses all expressing, / But 'tis too short a blessing, / And love too long a pain." The last line balances "too short" against "too long" like a seesaw, and the pain wins. Love's happiness is real but brief, and its aftermath goes on and on. The rest of the poem explains how that imbalance comes about and what it costs her.
The form makes the complaint sound almost light. The lines are short, six or seven syllables with about three beats each, and the rhythm has a lilt. The shape suggests a song, though the text alone cannot prove it. The rhyme scheme works like a trap. In every stanza the second, fourth and eighth lines share the sound *-ain*: "swain," "again," "pain" in the first stanza, "pain," "vain," "again" in the second, and "obtain," "disdain," "pain" in the third. The key words of her grief keep returning, and she cannot escape the sound any more than she can escape the situation. Lines five to seven then pile up a triple rhyme: "possessing / expressing / blessing," "descried it / beside it / tried it," "measure / treasure / pleasure." These run on almost breathlessly, like a rising excitement, until the eighth line snaps back to *-ain* and shuts the stanza.
Repeated words also change their meaning. "Pain" first appears as the general cost of love. In the second stanza it belongs to the man: "In pity of your pain." That is the pain he performs in order to win her sympathy. By the end it is hers again, with sharper force: "dying is a pleasure / When living is a pain." The word "pleasure" has also changed hands. In the first stanza it is erotic delight, and in the last it is the relief of death. The same two words frame the poem, but the stakes have grown darker.
The vocabulary comes from several worlds. "Traitor" and "perjur'd" belong to politics and law, so a lover's betrayal is treated like a broken oath. "Swain" is a soft, pastoral word for a country lover, and here it sounds bitterly ironic. "Charm" and "charmer" suggest enchantment, as if his affection were a spell cast for a purpose. Then comes the language of acquisition: "possessing," "obtain," "treasure," "lost." Her claim in the third stanza is that "The passion you pretended / Was only to obtain," and that "once the charm is ended, / The charmer you disdain." Love becomes a conquest, and the prize loses its value once it is won. The line "Your love by ours we measure" shows how the trick works. Judging by the line, women take their own feeling as the gauge of his, and that is the error that ruins them.
She also knows that protest changes nothing. Men leave, she says, "To rail at you in vain," and the poem is itself a piece of railing. That self-awareness gives it a bitter intelligence. She is angry, but she has no illusions about what her anger can achieve.
The poem is worth reading for how much it gets into so small a space. It has three stanzas and plain, mostly one- or two-syllable words, yet it holds betrayal, a general warning, a theory of how seduction works and, at the end, a flicker of despair. The contrast between the dance-like music and the harshness of the argument is its most striking feature. It is also one-sided, since the man never replies, and that adds to the sense of a case closed against him. Dryden, a leading literary figure of late seventeenth-century England, shows here that he can write a voice of hurt with economy and bite.