Drayton's speaker opens by asking a favour, and he asks it with a smile. Sensible people, he says, put up with fools and children, so they had better put up with him and with Love too. The word "bears" works twice in the first two lines, first as a general truth ("good discretion bears"), then as a plea ("bear with Love and me"). The request sounds less like begging than like the logical result of a rule everyone already accepts. Agree with line one and you are committed to line two.
The confession follows. He is "nor older yet, nor wiser made by years", so time has taught him nothing, and he must take his place "amongst the rest of fools and children". The stacked negatives make the syntax a little knotty, as if he were too foolish to put his own sentence in order. Love is the other culprit. He is "still a baby", playing with "gauds and toys", meaning showy trinkets of no value, and sporting "like a wanton" with "every feather". The feather is a nice choice. It is the lightest thing imaginable, blown about by any breath, and it suggests a love that is weightless and easily distracted. The winged boy Cupid may lurk behind the image, though the poem never names him. Then comes the line "idiots still are running after boys". The lover is the idiot and Love is the boy he chases. The octave closes with a verdict that sounds almost legal: "fools and children fitt'st to go together".
The form is the English sonnet, three quatrains and a couplet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. The pentameter is steady and conversational, close to speech. Lines 6 and 8 end on unstressed syllables ("feather", "together"), which gives them a light, tripping fall that suits their subject. The third quatrain shifts from defence to display. Love is "still as young as when he first was born", while the speaker is "no wiser… than when as young as he". The repeated "still" does a good deal of work. Love never ages, and the lover never learns. Then the speaker turns on his audience: "laugh us not to scorn; / Give Nature thanks you are not such as we." The tone is hard to pin down. It could be humble gratitude or a barbed little bow. The phrase treats folly as a gift of birth, something Nature handed out unevenly, and it invites onlookers to feel superior while quietly warning them not to be too sure.
The couplet is where the poem springs its trap. "Yet" is the hinge. Fools and children, the speaker says, "sometimes tell in play / Some, wise in show, more fools indeed than they." This echoes the familiar proverb that fools and children speak the truth, but Drayton compresses it so tightly that the truth itself goes unstated. We are told that they "tell", and the reader must supply what they tell: that some people who look wise are bigger fools than anyone. The contrast between "wise in show" and "fools indeed" turns the whole poem inside out. Appearance and reality swap places, and the audience who were invited to feel thankful for their good sense now have reason to check it.
The word "play" matters here as well. Earlier it described Love's idleness: he "plays" and "sports". In the last line, play becomes a way of delivering truth. The sonnet has been doing this all along. By pretending to be foolish, the speaker has been able to say something sharp without being accused of preaching. The heading "To Folly" fits this double game, since the poem reads as both a confession and a salute.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. The idea of the lover as a fool was a well-worn one in love poetry, and Drayton keeps its surface while changing its use. Self-mockery becomes a shield, then a weapon. The poem also shows how a final couplet can overturn the thirteen lines before it, so that the joke at the speaker's expense turns out to be aimed, gently but firmly, at everyone who thought they were laughing.