Love with nothing to hope for, and a hope that will not go away: Drayton's sonnet turns this knot over and over until the reader feels as tangled as the speaker. Nothing happens in the poem. No beloved speaks and no event interrupts. There is only a mind going round a closed circuit. Its central idea is that hope and despair, which look like opposites, have become each other's life support, and the speaker is trapped between them.
The first line sets the trap with two small words: "I ever love where never hope appears." "Ever" and "never" sit side by side, and the rest of the quatrain keeps pairing them. The speaker has a "never-hoping care" and a "never-certain joy" that "breeds ever-certain fears." The mirrored compounds make joy and fear sound like a mechanism: the one produces the other with grim reliability. The boldest move comes in line 3, where "my life's hope would die, but for despair." Despair is meant to kill hope, yet here it keeps hope alive, because a hope with no uncertainty to push against would have nothing left to be.
The second quatrain turns to flight. "Uncertain dread gives wings unto my hope," but the wings are "laden so with fear / As they cannot ascend to my hope's sphere." The language of astronomy and the heavens ("sphere," "heav'nly scope") promises height and freedom, and then the next line takes it back. Fear lends the wings enough power to give "more than a heav'nly scope," a huge range of movement, yet "this large room is bounded with despair." The phrase "large room" is a small masterpiece of contradiction, since a room, however big, still has walls. The speaker's imagination can roam widely and still never get out.
By the third quatrain the metaphor has hardened into prison vocabulary: love is "fetter'd with vain hope," and liberty, oddly, "deprives him of his scope." Even freedom has become a kind of restriction. Then comes the line that gathers everything up: "thus am I imprison'd in the air." A prison of air has no bars to rattle and no door to break, so there is nothing to push against. That fits the earlier flying imagery perfectly. The wings were never useless, because the speaker really is aloft, but the sky itself is the cell.
The form reinforces the feeling of confinement. The poem is a sonnet in iambic pentameter, and the rhythm is steady enough to feel like pacing: "I EVer LOVE where NEVer HOPE apPEARS." Its rhymes are enclosed (abba, cddc), a pattern in which the outer lines wrap around the inner pair. More tellingly, the poem keeps recycling its sounds. The "-ope" sound of "hope" and "scope" turns up four times, in lines 5, 8, 10 and 11. The "-air" sound returns in "care," "despair," "despair" again, and finally "air." Instead of widening its vocabulary as it goes, the poem keeps landing on the same few words. "Hope" and "despair" are repeated until they stop sounding like ideas and start sounding like walls.
The closing couplet brings a surprise. The speaker turns directly to the enemy: "Then, sweet despair, awhile hold up thy head, / Or all my hope for sorrow will be dead." Calling despair "sweet" and asking it to hold its head up, as one might encourage a tired friend, is both tender and absurd. The logic is the poem's logic in miniature: if despair weakens, hope will die of grief, so the speaker must beg his own torment to stay strong. The title, "To Despair," makes the whole sonnet one long address to this strange partner.
What makes the poem worth reading is how completely form and meaning agree. Many love poems describe suffering; this one builds the experience of being stuck. Paradoxes, mirrored phrases and repeated rhymes work together so that we feel the loop closing, and the final plea sounds less like a solution than like the only move left inside the cage. It also shows how much feeling a sonnet can hold when a poet treats a handful of words as raw material and presses them into every shape they will take.