Most poems treat time as a thief. Drayton's sonnet does something stranger: it grabs Time by the sleeve, orders it to halt, and turns it into a witness. The opening line, "Stay, speedy Time, behold, before thou pass," is chopped into short pieces by commas, so the reader has to slow down and the line seems to enact the stopping it demands. What Time must look at is a woman, though she is not named as one until the very end. For twelve lines she is only "One in whom all the excellencies be," so perfect that "Heav'n looks itself as in a glass."
That glass, meaning mirror, is the poem's governing image, and it works twice. Heaven sees itself in her, and then Time is told to "look thyself in this tralucent glass" ("tralucent" is an old form of translucent). What Time finds there is its own "youth past," the "world's beauty in his infancy." She reflects both the divine and the temporal. It is tempting, though this is an inference, to hear an echo of the hourglass, Time's traditional emblem. If so, Time is being asked to look into a different glass from the one it usually carries. Drayton also ends two consecutive lines, 4 and 5, with the same word, "glass," so the word is mirrored in the rhyme itself.
The structure is a hybrid. The rhymes run abba abba cddc ee. The octave resembles the Petrarchan sonnet, while the closing couplet belongs to the English form. The pattern matters because the poem turns exactly where the octave ends. Time, told to "Stay," is now told "Pass on," and the order changes from looking to reporting. Time is to "tell posterity," with a stern condition: "see thou tell but truly what hath been." That condition is a clever one. The praise is wildly hyperbolic, but by demanding truthfulness Drayton makes it sound like sworn testimony. His "nephews," the later generations, are to hear that Time once saw "in perfect human shape all heav'nly bliss," a phrase that squeezes the human and the heavenly into a single line.
Line 8, "What is was then, and thou before it was," is the knottiest in the poem. The tangle of "is" and "was" seems to say that what she is now matches what the world's beauty was at its beginning, and that Time existed even before that. Past and present are folded together, which suits a poem that wants to stop the clock.
The couplet brings the poem's one real shock. "She" appears for the first time, and she "is gone." The text does not say whether this means death or some other loss, but the response is clear: Time must "bid them mourn, nay more, despair with thee." The phrase "nay more" shows ordinary grief being judged too small, and the surprise is that Time itself is cast as a fellow mourner, despairing alongside the speaker. The last line, "her like again to see," also closes a loop. The poem began with Time having "sought to see" this perfection across the ages, and it ends by saying no one will see her like again. "See" and "seen" carry the whole poem, appearing in lines 2, 6, 11 and 14, and the quest that opened it ends in loss.
The sonnet is significant because it takes a stock theme of Renaissance love poetry, the beloved's incomparable beauty, and gives it a different shape. Time is usually the enemy who destroys what the poet adores. Here it becomes an ally and archivist, ordered to preserve the record. The loss is no longer only the speaker's private grief. It becomes a loss for history, something that Time, the one witness who has seen everything, must pass down. In a sense the poem does the telling it asks Time to do. By the final line the reader is the posterity being addressed, left to mourn someone they never saw.