Drayton starts with a little piece of theatre. "Methinks I see some crooked mimic jeer," he says, and the critic he imagines appears in the room: turning over the poet's pages, pulling "some filthy antic face," sneering "What have we here?" The poem is a defence of the poet's own style, a refusal to be written off as fanciful or affected. But the critic may exist only in Drayton's head. "Methinks" admits as much, so he is arguing with a figure he has built himself, and a figure like that is easy to knock down.
The rest of the poem is the knocking down. The sonnet follows the English pattern of three quatrains and a couplet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg, and the quatrains work as three rounds of one argument. In the first the critic sneers. In the second the poet turns on him and switches to "thou": "I fear no censure, nor what thou canst say." In the third he explains why. Sonnets, he complains, "in bundles are imprest" (printed in heaps), and "every drudge doth dull our satiate ear." The word "satiate" makes the market sound stuffed, a reader gorged on identical verses. Underneath this is the claim that the age is drowning in sonnets, so a poet must either follow the herd or stand apart from it.
The imagery is built on contrast between the low and the high. His wit refuses to "keep the pack-horse way," the well-worn track of plodding animals carrying ordinary loads. Love, the traditional subject of sonnets, is pictured as a person who must not be "in those rags … drest / That every dowdy, every trull, doth wear." Poetry here is clothing, and the cheap kind is worn by everyone. The repeated "every" (every dudgen invention, every drudge, every dowdy, every trull) turns his rivals into a faceless crowd, all in the same shabby outfit. "Dudgen" seems to mean coarse or base, so even the words he picks for the crowd are chosen to sound rough.
That roughness is part of the sound. Hard d and k sounds run through the poem: "crooked mimic," "drudge doth dull," "dudgen," "dung-bred." Reading it aloud, you can hear Drayton spitting. The rhythm is a steady iambic pentameter, but he leans on it at the right moments. The two rhetorical questions that begin "Think'st thou…" press the critic hard, and both come as the quatrain is closing, so each lands like a challenge thrown down.
The couplet is where the poem rises and falls at once. "Up to my pitch no common judgement flies" lifts off on its very first word. "Pitch" is a term from falconry for the height a hawk climbs before it stoops, and even without that sense the line is clearly about altitude. Then the final line drops to the ground: "I scorn all earthly dung-bred scarabies." Scarabs are beetles, and these ones are born in dung. The rhyme of "flies" with "scarabies" holds the two ends of the poem's world together, the soaring poet and the creatures crawling below him, and it makes the insult slightly comic as well as cruel.
What makes the poem interesting is that it doesn't quite practise what it preaches. Drayton sneers at the sonnet fashion in a sonnet, using the same fourteen-line form as the "bundles" he mocks. His language is also far from lofty: "filthy," "dung-bred," "trull" are as earthy as anything he accuses others of. One reading is that he is a proud, self-assured poet who knows what he is worth. Another is that the loudness of "I fear no censure" suggests a writer who minds criticism more than he lets on. The poem supports both readings, and that tension is what keeps it alive.
It is also a rare kind of sonnet. Sonnets of this era usually address a beloved, real or imagined. Here the addressee is a hostile reader, and love appears only as something that must be dressed with care. The poem's real subject is the poet's pride in his craft, and its claim is bold: to write well you must refuse the easy road, even if that makes you sound arrogant. Few poems state their artistic stance so bluntly or with such relish for a good insult.