Love, in this sonnet, is not a noble force but a bad host. Michael Drayton turns the familiar complaint of the lovesick poet into a small drama of a dinner party that ends in murder. The joke is that the victim has paid for everything. "In a humor" meant in a passing mood or whim, and from the first line Love is capricious: he "play'd the prodigal," a spendthrift throwing a lavish party. The money, we soon learn, is the speaker's own feeling.
The whole poem is one extended conceit. The Senses are summoned to a "solemn feast," and the Heart is invited as "chiefest guest." The flattering phrase makes the later betrayal sharper. Then the metaphor darkens. Love is a "glutton" and an "epicure," and the only drink that satisfies him is "precious tears distilling from mine eyne." "Distilling" suggests grief slowly refined, drop by drop, into expensive liquor, while the speaker's sighs "burn" like fuel under the party. Tears and sighs were stock props of Renaissance love poetry, and Drayton takes them literally, turning them into wine and firewood. He mocks the habit of lovers' lamenting while still using it. "Eyne," an old plural of "eyes," is partly there to rhyme with "wine," but it also gives the line a slightly antique, mock-solemn ring.
The form is the English sonnet: three quatrains rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF, then a closing couplet, all in iambic pentameter. The quatrains match the stages of the evening. The first sets up the invitation, the second shows the drinking, and the third brings the violence. The pace is carefully managed. Lines 9 to 12 are a single sentence in which "he plays a swaggering ruffian's part" and the deed itself is held back until the last line, where "Slew" lands like a blow. The tense shifts here too. The poem moves through "bade," "Invites," and "plays" and then jumps to the past tense, as if the killing happened before we could stop it.
The language of performance runs quietly through the poem. Love "play'd the prodigal," and later he "plays a swaggering ruffian's part." He puts on roles the way a whim puts on moods: generous host first, then brawler. This fits the word "humor" in the title, since a creature of moods has no steady character, and a heart that trusts him is in danger. The sounds change with the roles. The early lines are soft and flowing ("precious tears distilling"), while the later ones turn thick and heavy ("Quaffing carouses," "swaggering ruffian"). "Heart" is capitalised and personified as a "dear friend," "kind and truest," so the final blow feels like the murder of a person, not just a figure of speech. Placing "Heart" at the end of the line, rhymed with "part," lets the word echo the theatrical role that has just been played.
The couplet changes the tone. "A gentle warning, friends" is wry understatement, since the warning follows a killing. The speaker drops the dense imagery and speaks plainly, almost like a proverb: "What 'tis to keep a drunkard company." The advice comes too late for him, because he is the host who supplied the wine, and this gives the ending a bitter comedy. The warning is aimed at the reader, who is invited to learn from his loss.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in fourteen lines. Its central idea is that love, indulged without restraint, destroys the very heart that feeds it, and it gets this across through one sustained image instead of abstract statement. It also shows a poet handling a conventional subject with wit. Instead of offering one more sigh over a cruel lover, Drayton lets pain and humour sit together. The result is a poem that stays light on the surface while saying something sharp about self-destruction.