Michael Drayton’s speaker sees in his mind a sneering critic, twisting his face into a filthy antic as he flips through the pages. Right from the start, the mood is defiant and prickly. The speaker refuses to be cowed: he insists his spirit won’t lose any vigor, whatever the critic says. He fires back with a series of biting questions—should his wit trudge along the common road like every dull, plodding poem? With sonnets being churned out in bundles, and tired verse already cloying the ear, he has no intention of dressing his love in the same shabby rags worn by every low, careless writer.
Instead, the speaker draws a sharp line between his ambition and the ordinary world. He claims that no common judgment can fly up to his pitch—his standards and vision are simply out of reach. The closing image is pure scorn: he dismisses all critics as mere earthbound dung-beetles, creatures feeding on filth. The whole poem bristles with pride and a kind of aristocratic disgust for mediocrity. It’s a short, sharp refusal to play by anyone else’s rules, leaving the critic far below.