Most love sonnets promise the beloved a kind of immortality. Drayton's eighth does something sharper: it spends fourteen lines longing for the day his lady's beauty is gone. The first line sounds like the usual lament about time rushing on, but the second overturns it. What grieves the speaker is that he may not live long enough to "see thee old." It is a love poem turned inside out, and the grudge behind it is spelled out only in the final couplet: she scorns his verses, and he means to pay her back.
The form is the English sonnet, with three quatrains rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF and a closing couplet. The rhythm is a steady iambic pentameter ("There's NOthing GRIEVES me, BUT that AGE should HASTE"), which gives the cruelty a courteous, almost formal air. The syntax is more interesting. Everything from line 2 to line 12 hangs on that opening "that": that I may not see you old, that where your eyes are I might behold loop-holes, that I might but see your brow defaced. The sentence keeps piling up, one withered feature after another, until the reader feels the years accumulating. Only in the couplet does the pile tip into action: "Then would I make thee read." The rhyme of "delight thee" and "despite thee" lets two near-opposite ideas almost touch, with the same "thee" ringing at the end like a pointing finger.
Drayton builds the poem on the Renaissance habit of cataloguing a lady's features (eyes, brow, hair, cheek, lips, teeth) and praising each in precious images. He keeps the catalogue but reverses the verdict. The brow was "ivory, polish'd," a surface so smooth it might be carved, and now it is "defac'd," a word that suggests a coin or monument scratched out. The cheek "flush with roses" becomes "sunk and lean." The pearly teeth simply vanish, "out of thy head so clean." Nearly every line sets a "now" against a "then," so the lady's present loveliness is brought in only as a yardstick for her decay.
The most inventive comparisons are the least flattering. Her "clear sparkling" eyes shrink to "two loop-holes," the narrow slits in a fortress wall, so that the eyes that once shone at him now peer out like a sentry's. Her "curl'd and crisped" hair turns into "grizzled moss upon some aged tree," and the imagery slides from the drawing room to the forest floor. Her lips are "as any wafer thin," and then, in the last line of the quatrain, Drayton drops from the poetic to the domestic: "when thou feed'st, thy nose shall touch thy chin." The blunt monosyllables land like a punchline. Beauty is humbled by something as undignified as eating dinner.
The couplet is where the tone turns personal. "These lines that now thou scorn'st" must mean the poem itself, yet "lines" also means wrinkles, and after the "wrinkles" of line six the double meaning is hard to miss. Her face and his verse become the same text, and he will make her read it "but to despite thee." The speaker is not admirable. He never admits that he will be old too, and his revenge fantasy is petty. That pettiness is the poem's charm, because the reader is left unsure whether to laugh, wince, or both, and unsure how serious the joke is. The poem suggests a lover stung by rejection who answers with wit, the only weapon he has.
That is why the poem is worth reading. It shows that a sonnet need not be reverent, and that the stock praise of roses, pearls and ivory can be turned against the person it was meant to flatter. It also leaves an uncomfortable truth under the joke. The beauty that love poetry celebrates is temporary, and the speaker's anger comes from being shut out of it.