Michael Drayton starts like a man laying down a rule of thumb: ordinary experience, he says, sometimes teaches what scholars and even reason cannot. His example is gruesome. If the guilty are brought near the body of a murder victim, the corpse is said to bleed afresh. Then the sonnet pivots. The speaker has a murderer of his own, the woman who "hath slain" his heart, and she is walking toward him. His old wounds break open at once. The sonnet ends with a shrug that cuts deeper than any outcry: even if she were executed, that would serve justice but "helps not the dead."
The first eight lines pretend to be a calm argument. "Plain-path'd" is a plodding phrase, two stressed syllables side by side, and it suits the humble, well-trodden road of common knowledge. The "Schoolmen," the learned philosophers of the universities, are set against the "unlearned" with their "simple followers." Nobody is quite persuaded by this, because the evidence offered is a folk belief about corpses. Drayton lets the claim sit with a straight face, and that gives the poem a dry irony. Line 8, "Oft it hath been prov'd the breathless corse will bleed," slows to a crawl with its heavy monosyllables, and the word "corse" gives it an archaic chill.
The vocabulary quietly blends the laboratory with the courtroom. "Making trial" can mean testing an idea or trying a case, and "prov'd," "deed," "actors," and later "justice" all keep that double sense alive. The poem is built like a legal case. The bleeding body is the testimony, and the accused is the beloved. What the speaker offers as proof of her guilt is his own suffering. He is both victim and witness.
The form helps with this. It is a Shakespearean sonnet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg, in iambic pentameter. The first quatrain is all theory. The second brings in the bleeding corpse, and "deed" and "bleed" ring together like a verdict. The turn comes at line 9, with the abrupt "She's coming near." The tone drops from lecture to private emergency. The syntax shows the speaker's helplessness: "The ancient wounds no longer can contain, / But fall to bleeding as they did before." The wounds are the grammatical subject, and the speaker has no agency at all. The verb "fall" suggests collapse, not choice. The echo of "bleed" in "bleeding" carries the first half's proof into the second, and "as they did before" tells us the pain has never really healed, only waited.
One phrase in the sestet is ambiguous. "Long since departed, to the world no more" could describe the heart, or the speaker himself, or even the woman. The poem does not settle it. The ambiguity works in its favor, because the speaker is both dead and alive here. He is dead enough to count as a corpse and alive enough to bleed.
The couplet delivers the real sting. "But what of this?" sounds almost bored, as if the speaker has followed his own argument to its end and found it useless. Experience may be a trustworthy guide, and the body's reaction may be perfect evidence, but evidence only establishes guilt. It cannot repair anything. Executing her ("Should she to death be led") would satisfy a legal appetite while leaving his loss exactly where it was. The last line is balanced almost like a proverb, "justice" on one side and "the dead" on the other, and the neatness of that balance makes the emptiness more bitter.
The sonnet is worth reading because it takes a familiar subject, a lover wounded by a cruel beloved, and turns it into a crime scene with a surprisingly modern ending. Many love poems beg for pity or threaten revenge. This one admits that even vindication would be hollow. The speaker has the proof he wanted, the wounds themselves, and it turns out to be worth nothing. A poem that opens by praising the practical wisdom of experience closes by showing its limit: experience can tell you who hurt you, but it cannot undo the hurt.