Drayton's speaker bursts in mid-quarrel. There is no portrait of the beloved's beauty and no gentle approach, only an indignant "What?" that sounds like a man who has just found his pocket empty. The sonnet is a lover's complaint, and its central idea is a joke with a bitter edge. The woman has taken his heart and given nothing back, but the real outrage is that she may have no heart of her own to give. By the final couplet the argument has gone full circle: you cannot be paid in kind by someone who has nothing to pay with.
Most of the poem's language comes from the marketplace and the courtroom. She is accused of trying to "cheat" him, to "take all mine and give me none again." Her eyes are suspected of "magic" or "art," a stock idea in love poetry, but Drayton gives it a miser's twist. The trouble is that "what they get they ever do retain," as if her eyes were a locked strongbox. The rhyme of "heart" with "art" in the first quatrain quietly joins the thing lost to the trickery that took it.
In the second quatrain the speaker switches from accusing to pleading, and the pleading is rather clever. "Play not the tyrant" casts her as a ruler, while "remorse," here meaning pity, and "rebate thy spleen" ask her to blunt her anger like a sharp blade. Then he starts to haggle. "'Scourse" is a clipped form of a word that could mean to barter or swap, and the bargain that follows is absurdly lopsided: "for one piece of thine, my whole heart take." He once demanded everything back. Now he will settle for a crumb of her heart in exchange for all of his, which she already holds. The offer shows how far his pride has fallen.
The poem's rhythm helps this sense of overheard speech. The lines are regular iambic pentameter, but the sentences keep breaking the pattern with their stresses. "What?" and "Play" land on the very first beat, so the questions and commands hit like slaps. Between the opening demand and the closing insult, the speaker asks six questions. Each looks for an answer, and none gets one, which makes the silence of the beloved part of the drama.
The third quatrain begins with "But," and the speaker abruptly talks himself out of begging. "But what of pity do I speak to thee, / Whose breast is proof against complaint or prayer?" The word "proof" borrows from armour, so her chest becomes a plate that no plea can pierce. The rhyme of "prayer" with "betrayer" is cruelly neat, since his prayer and her betrayal sit in the same sound. The phrase "that proud beauty, which was my betrayer" also moves into the past tense. The damage seems to be done already, and he is only now adding up what it cost him.
The couplet delivers the punchline. "What talk I of a heart, when thou hast none?" plays on the word "heartless," turning a familiar insult back into a literal fact. Then comes the sting, tucked into the last line: "Or, if thou hast, it is a flinty one." The grudging "if" makes the insult sound like reasonable fairness. The speaker concedes, almost generously, that she might have a heart, and then ruins the concession with "flinty." Flint is hard stone, which fits the poem's earlier armour and tyrant imagery. One could even hear a hint of sparks in it, though that is a guess at what the word suggests.
What makes the sonnet worth reading is how much life it finds in an old situation, the lover wronged by a cold beloved. Drayton gives that situation a speaking voice that rises, bargains, gives up and turns sour in fourteen lines. The English sonnet pattern of three quatrains and a couplet suits the movement well. Each quatrain moves the mood along, and the couplet snaps the argument shut. The poem is also a good lesson in how one image can run through a whole text. The heart appears as a stolen possession, an offered payment, a missing organ and finally a stone, and each turn makes the lover's loss feel a little more complete.