"Marvel not, Love" sounds like polite reassurance, but it is really a speaker defending himself. He tells Love, personified and addressed directly, not to be surprised that he admires its power. In the English of Drayton's time, "admire" could still mean "wonder at," so the opening line quietly folds in on itself: do not wonder that I wonder. The subtitle, "To Admiration," points the same way. The central idea is a paradox. Love has lifted the speaker's mind past every limit, and yet he remains "only starv'd in my desire." His imagination is enormous, and his satisfaction is nil.
The construction is the most unusual thing about the poem. The rhymes run ABBA ACCA ADDA EE, but the A-lines are not merely rhymed, they are repeated. Line 1 returns word for word as lines 5 and 9. Line 4 returns as line 8, and in line 12 it comes back with only a small change ("And yet am only starv'd"). In each quatrain, just the two middle lines bring anything new. The sonnet is wound into a spiral, and the sound of "admire" and "desire" never moves on. The effect is obsessive, like someone going over the same grievance again and again. The poem does not only say the speaker is stuck, it makes the reader feel stuck with him.
Within that narrow track, the new lines climb as high as they can. First comes "a world beyond the farthest thought," then "knowing more than ever hath been taught," then "things exceeding all perfection." The speaker even claims he could "minister correction" to "Wisdom's self." The pairing of "perfection" and "correction" is a little joke at his own expense, since something beyond perfection should have nothing left to correct. In the third quatrain the boast grows shakier: "my conceit I further seem to bend / Than possibly invention can extend." The word "seem" is easy to miss, but it admits that these imaginative flights may be more appearance than achievement. "Conceit" here means imagination or idea, and "bend" suggests a bow strained to its limit.
Against all this stretching, "starv'd" is the one image of the body, and it drops the speaker back to earth. "Ravish'd" has already hinted at passivity, since Love carries him off and he does not choose to go. "Only" works in two ways. It can mean "merely," which makes the hunger sound small, or "solely," which makes it the single thing wrong. The line has to carry both, and that gives its repetition real tension. The meter is steady iambic pentameter, but lines 6 and 7 end on "perfection" and "correction." If the endings are sounded as three syllables, as verse of the period often did, each line gets a softer, extra beat, almost a sigh.
The couplet is where the poem turns. "If thou wilt wonder, here's the wonder, Love" borrows the refrain's addressing of Love but changes its tone, becoming sharper and almost teasing. The word "marvel" is replaced by "wonder," which appears three times in two lines. The real marvel, the speaker says, is that "this to me doth yet no wonder prove." The poem leaves open why. Perhaps he has been hungry so long that it feels ordinary. Perhaps this is simply how love works, and being starved while still admiring is its normal condition. Perhaps wonder has worn thin through the very repetition we have just read. The last line, made of plain one-syllable words, ends flatly where we might expect a flourish, and that deflation is part of the point.
What makes the poem worth reading is that its form and its meaning are the same thing. A looser sonnet might simply tell us that the lover is frustrated. Here the refrain acts out frustration, because language keeps circling back to the one place it cannot get beyond. The speaker's mind claims to outrun wisdom, perfection and invention, yet his words cannot leave the same two rhymes. It is a witty poem, but the wit has a sore spot underneath, and the final couplet suggests that the most troubling thing about longing is how normal it begins to feel.