Nobody who truly wants to leave says "let us kiss and part" so tenderly. Drayton's speaker announces a clean break, but the sonnet slowly shows that he cannot bear it. For twelve lines he plays the part of someone who has moved on, and in the last two he drops the act and asks his lover to save the relationship. The central idea is that pride and love pull in opposite directions, and love wins at the last moment.
The opening performance is built with care. "Since there's no help" sounds like a reasoned conclusion, as though a doctor were closing a file. The speaker then borrows the language of business and law: "Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows." Lovers do not shake hands, and the line makes a passionate attachment sound like a contract being torn up. The rhythm helps. Most of the poem runs in smooth iambic pentameter, but the opening lines keep stalling on heavy, clipped phrases such as "Nay, I have done," and "Shake hands" begins with two strong beats, like a door slammed shut. Yet the very first line gives him away. "Kiss" is the most intimate word he could have chosen for a farewell that is supposed to be cold.
The speaker also protests too much. He says he is "glad, yea, glad with all my heart", but the heart he is glad with is the one being broken, and the doubled "glad" sounds like someone talking himself into it. The word "cleanly" suggests a surgeon's cut, a quick and painless separation, while the sheer length of his speech suggests the opposite. Even the plan for the future is about concealment. If they meet again, nothing should show "in either of our brows" and no "jot of former love" should be visible. The fear is that his face will betray him, which already admits that the feeling is still there.
At line 9 ("Now at the last gasp") the poem turns, and the sonnet's form makes the turn clear. It follows the English pattern of three quatrains and a couplet, rhymed *abab cdcd efef gg*. The first eight lines are the argument for leaving. Then the speaker shifts into allegory and imagines Love as a dying man at his bedside, with his "pulse failing" and Passion "speechless." The attendants are abstractions: Faith kneels as if praying, and Innocence closes the eyes. Each figure is a quality the relationship once had, and each is now shown helpless. The deathbed is also a trap the speaker has set for himself. If love is dying, someone must have been responsible for its illness, and the scene is hard to watch without feeling grief, which contradicts the earlier claim of gladness.
The couplet delivers the reversal: "Now, if thou wouldst, when all have giv'n him over, / From death to life thou might'st him yet recover." Two small details matter here. The speaker slips from the cooler "you" of line 2 to the more intimate "thou," as if his guard has dropped. And the rhyme of "over" with "recover" is a quiet piece of wordplay. "Given over" means given up for dead, and "recover" contains that same word "over," so the ending and the cure share a sound. The final line is also grammatically tentative, built on "if" and "might'st." He cannot demand anything, so he can only suggest that she is the one person able to revive what everyone else has abandoned.
The poem is worth reading because it makes a familiar situation feel dramatic and true. Many love poems praise or mourn, but this one captures a mind changing as we watch it. It also leaves open how sincere the final plea is. It could be a last desperate honesty, or one more move in a game of pride. The poem gives no answer, and that uncertainty keeps the speaker believable. He is an imperfect lover who starts out in command of his words and ends up exposed by them.