Michael Drayton opens with a grumble aimed at the universe itself: "O why should Nature niggardly restrain / That foreign nations relish not our tongue?" Nature is cast as a miser who has kept English from travelling, and the verb "relish" turns language into food that other countries refuse to taste. If they would only try it, he says, his lines would "glide on the waves of Rhene" and "crown the Pyrens with my living song." The poem is about ambition running into a boundary. Drayton wants a European audience, knows English will not carry him there, and so redraws the map of his own fame.
That redrawing happens at the turn in line five, with the word "bounded." It is a neat choice, since it names the limit the poem has just complained about and also begins the work of going around it. From here Drayton speaks to his own verses as if they were messengers or birds: "get you forth," "take you wing." They are sent to Scotland, then on to the "Orcades" (the Orkney Islands), a spot at the far northern edge of the map. The poem's direction shifts from the great rivers and mountains of the continent to the cold margins of the British Isles, where English might be understood.
The shape holds all this together. It is a Shakespearean sonnet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg, in a mostly steady iambic pentameter. The first quatrain asks the question, the second sends the verses north, the third reaches Ireland, and the couplet gathers everything into one image. The rhymes sometimes carry the argument. "Tongue" and "song" are paired in the opening quatrain, so that language and music are linked from the start. "Forth" and "North" later chime like a direction on a compass.
The imagery is built on a contrast between water, ice and fire. In the first quatrain the verse is liquid, gliding over the Rhine, and the Pyrenees are given a crown. Then in the north the poet's "sighs" are strong enough to "thaw the frozen seas." The sigh is a stock gesture of love poetry, and the poem seems to borrow it here, a lover's breath turned into a weapon against the ice. The Muse then passes to Ireland on a "fiery wing." Cold becomes the enemy, and verse is the heat that overcomes it.
The final sestet gets stranger and more interesting. The Irish bards, whom Drayton imagines carrying his song, are asked to "Call back the stiff-neck'd rebels from exile, / And mollify the slaught'ring Gallowglass." The sounds do the work of the meaning. "Mollify" is soft and slow, while "stiff-neck'd" and "slaught'ring" are clipped and harsh. The Gallowglass, a kind of heavy warrior, is the hardest audience the poem can think of, and poetry is meant to soften him. The final line goes further still: "Let wolves and bears be charmed with my verse." Anyone who knows the myth of Orpheus will hear the echo of a singer who tames animals.
Notice how the audience keeps shrinking in prestige. The poem begins by courting whole nations, moves to exiles and fighters, and ends with beasts who cannot read at all. Whether or not Drayton means this as a joke, the effect is wry. A poet who cannot reach the cultured readers of Europe settles for the wildest listeners imaginable, and still claims total victory. Modern readers may also notice the condescension in the poem's own terms. Rebels, soldiers and animals are lumped together as things to be calmed, and the poem never pictures them as readers with a will of their own.
The sonnet matters because it shows a poet thinking about how far his language can reach, and how much poetry is supposed to be able to do. Its claim is almost absurdly large: that verse can melt seas, end exile and charm predators. That confidence is held in a tight fourteen-line frame, and the contrast is part of the pleasure. Today the opening complaint carries an irony of its own, since English is now read in nearly every country Drayton hoped to reach. The poem's wish has come true in a way he could not have predicted, and its energy still comes from that stubborn wanting.