Michael Drayton, an English poet who lived from 1563 to 1631 and so a contemporary of Shakespeare, begins this sonnet by flattering his beloved so lavishly that the compliment almost floats away. She is a "bright star of beauty," and on her eyelids sit not the three Graces of classical myth but "a thousand nymph-like and enamour'd Graces." The exaggeration is deliberate and playful. Her eyelids become a crowded court, and the line about the Graces taking "their several places" turns them into well-mannered courtiers waiting to be seated. Even their patron goddesses, "Memory and Wit," are said to belong to her.
The second quatrain brings in Love himself. Cupid, normally a dangerous figure armed with arrows, "Lays down his quiver" in her "dear bosom" and goes back to being a child who "leaves his mother's lap to sport him there." The image is gentle and domestic. Her beauty does not wound, as it does in many love poems. It disarms the god of desire and makes him playful. Drayton's praise is generous, but it is also tidy: every detail about her is another way of saying she is the place where order and tenderness meet.
Then comes the turn, signalled by the shift to "Let others strive to entertain with words." The poem swings from her to him, and the tone changes from ornament to defiance. His soul is "of a braver metal made," a phrase that suggests coin or sword and so something tested and hard. The quiver and the battlefield word "invade" in the next line give the sestet a faintly martial feel. What the speaker claims is a faith "which Time cannot invade." Time, the great enemy of beauty in so many sonnets, is here held off by loyalty rather than by verse.
There is a tension worth noticing. The speaker scorns "vulgar wit," yet "Wit" was one of the goddesses honoured in line 3. The word is praised in her and dismissed in other men, which suggests that Drayton separates true intelligence from showy cleverness. The poem also rejects flowery words while being a polished piece of verbal craft. Judging by the text, he does not reject language so much as claim a plain sincerity under it. His rivals decorate, while he simply stays true.
The couplet makes the poem more interesting than a straightforward love declaration: "Let what I praise be still made good by you; / Be you most worthy, whilst I am most true." These are imperatives, almost orders. The lover has just spent twelve lines elevating her, and now he states the terms. His praise will only stand up if she lives up to it, and his part of the arrangement is constancy. The neat balance of "worthy" and "true," with "you" rhyming against "true," makes the couplet feel like a handshake. It is both a compliment and a quiet challenge.
The form supports this. The sonnet follows the English pattern of three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The rhymes are a little looser than they first appear. "Love" and "prove" are an old rhyme that modern readers may see as an eye-rhyme, and they sit beside "bear" and "there" in the same quatrain. The rhythm is a steady iambic pentameter, with soft feminine endings in "Graces" and "places" that suit the gentle courtliness of the opening. When the speaker turns to himself, the lines become blunter and more end-stopped, as in "My soul is of a braver metal made." Even the contraction "In me's that faith" compresses the line to keep the beat, a small sign of the firmness being described.
Part of the poem's interest is that it is conventional on the surface and unusual underneath. It uses the stock Renaissance material of stars, goddesses and Cupid, but it ends not in worship but in mutual obligation. The speaker offers loyalty and asks for deserving in return, which makes the love feel like a promise that both people have to keep.