Michael Drayton's speaker cannot make a statement without taking it back. The sonnet opens on a riddle, "When first I ended, then I first began," and after that almost no line is allowed to stand on one leg. Every feeling arrives with its opposite attached: joy inside woe, plenty inside hunger, fire inside ice. The poem never names the cause. But the burning and freezing, and the "hell of woe" shot through with rapture, belong to the familiar vocabulary of the lovesick speaker in Elizabethan sonnets, so it is reasonable to read this as a portrait of desire that has tied a mind in knots. Its central idea is that extreme feeling does not simply hurt or please. It scrambles the categories we use to tell the two apart.
The form is the English sonnet: three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef, then a closing couplet. The first quatrain works with the image of a journey, but one where effort produces the opposite of progress: "The more I travell'd, further from my rest." Line 3, "Where most I lost, there most of all I wan," repeats "most" so that loss and gain seem to happen in the same breath. ("Wan" is an old form of "won," chosen to rhyme with "began.") The quatrain ends on "Pined with hunger rising from a feast." "Rising" can mean getting up from the table or appetite swelling, and both readings leave the speaker hungrier for having been fed.
In the second quatrain the contradictions move from the speaker's situation to his own character. "Methinks I fly, yet want I legs to go" plays on "want," meaning "lack," a word that returns in the couplet. He feels airborne but has nothing to walk on. He is "Wise in conceit, in act a very sot": he thinks himself wise and behaves like a fool. The quatrain closes on its most unsettling line, "What most I seem, that surest am I not." Even his self-image can't be trusted, so the confusion is now about who he is as well as what he feels.
The third quatrain stretches the poem vertically. He builds his hopes "a world above the sky," yet creeps "with the mole into the earth." The mole's blind burrowing makes a sharp contrast with that soaring ambition. Sound ties the opposites together. "Plenty" and "penury" share their opening consonant, and the s-sounds of "starv'd," "penury" and "surfeit" run through the next two lines, so the words for abundance and lack seem almost interchangeable.
A Shakespearean-style couplet usually delivers a verdict or a turn. Drayton's compresses instead. "I have, I want, despair and yet desire" is a string of four short verbs, split into two pairs, and "despair" and "desire" sit close in sound as they do in feeling. The last line then spills past the usual ten syllables, as if the contradictions have outgrown the form: "Burn'd in a sea of ice and drown'd amidst a fire." The verbs cross over. We expect to freeze in ice and drown in a sea, but here burning goes with ice and drowning with fire. After thirteen lines of neat pairs, the final image knots the opposites together into something that can't be pictured at all.
Rhythm helps. The lines are mostly steady iambic pentameter, often cut by a pause into two balanced halves ("Wise in conceit, | in act a very sot"), which gives a see-saw motion. The regular beat and tidy rhymes make a calm frame around the chaos, so the speaker sounds composed in form even as his feelings come apart. That tension is part of the poem's quiet power.
The poem has no story, no addressee and no argument. It is a catalogue of one state of mind, and it can feel mechanical if you read it quickly. Slowed down, it shows something worth noticing. The speaker ends exactly where he began, in paradox, and the couplet offers no way out. The opening line ("When first I ended, then I first began") already described a circle, and the poem closes it. Instead of explaining overwhelming feeling, Drayton makes the language buckle under it.