Buried gold, a guardian spirit and a woman who won't answer her lover: Drayton fits all three into one extended comparison. The sonnet starts from an old folk belief. Men heading off to "wars at home" or "conquests" were afraid of thieves, so they handed their wealth to "spirits within the ground" and bound those spirits to guard it until the owners returned. The owners "never came" home, and the treasure stayed down there. Anyone who tries to dig it up "by art", meaning by magic, finds that the spirit cannot be forced. The closer the seekers get, the further the treasure slips away. Only at line 11 does the poem reveal its target: "so you alone do play / With those rich beauties Heav'n gives you to keep." The woman is the spirit, her beauty the buried gold, and the speaker is the frustrated treasure-hunter. His argument is that beauty locked away "to the coldness of your blood" is wasted, since it does neither her nor anyone else any good.
The sonnet follows the English pattern of three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, but it bends the usual proportions. A sonnet often turns near its middle, whereas here the comparison runs for ten lines before the woman is mentioned. The reader is made to wait for the point, which mirrors the poem's subject, since the meaning is withheld just as the treasure is. The woman then gets only four lines, and the final couplet ("blood" / "good") delivers a verdict. The word "keep" does quiet structural work too. In line 4 the owners "gave it to keep" to the spirits, and in line 12 Heaven "gives you to keep." The echo slides her into the spirit's role without any further explanation.
The syntax is knotty, and that is part of the effect. "Home when they never came" twists ordinary word order, and "Nearer men come, that further flies away" packs a whole chase into one lopsided line. The rhythm is basically iambic pentameter, but these inversions make the reading slow and effortful, a little like digging. Repeated words add to the feeling of going in circles. "Strongly tied," "the strong Spirit" and "strongly in the deep" make the guarding sound like sheer force, and "the same" turns up twice in two lines ("get the same", "force the same"), as though every attempt only returns to where it began.
The imagery also casts the speaker in an unflattering light, perhaps unintentionally. His courtship is described through "purloin," a word for theft, and through "art," which here suggests conjuring. He is a would-be thief trying to magic treasure out of the earth, and the poem seems aware that his methods fail ("by no means force the same"). The woman's side of the comparison has some sharp word choices as well. A spirit bound to its post would be grimly serious, yet she is said to "play" with her beauties, so her refusal is accused of being a game or a tease. "Alone" can mean both unique and isolated. The final couplet opens with "Pity," which carries two senses at once: "what a pity" and the compassion she lacks. Her "coldness of blood" echoes the cold ground where the gold lies, so the imagery stays consistent to the end. Her beauty is "left" to that coldness, as if abandoned there.
One reading goes further. In the story, the spirit at least guards for owners who intended to return. Here the owner is "Heav'n," and nothing suggests Heaven has asked for its gift back. The woman may therefore be guarding the treasure for no one. The poem never says so outright, but the implied question is a clever one: what is the point of such faithful watching?
The sonnet is worth reading because it shows a love poem working as an argument rather than a sigh. Instead of simply praising or begging, Drayton borrows a piece of folklore and the logic of money, and he makes the case that hoarded riches are dead riches. The closing line, "Not to avail you, nor do the others good," sounds generous, but the speaker is surely one of "the others," and the self-interest underneath the principle is part of what makes the poem interesting. It is not a smooth poem, but its unusual comparison, its delayed turn and its blunt ending give it a persuasive force that many more polished love sonnets lack.