The speaker of Drayton's sonnet starts like a man who has given up. "Since to obtain thee nothing will be stead", he says: nothing is of any use in winning the beloved. So he turns doctor and announces a "med'cine that shall cure my love". What follows is less a prescription than a witch's brew, and the joke is that it can never be made. Every ingredient comes from a woman too perfect to exist, so the cure is unobtainable and the love is incurable. The poem is a comic confession of helplessness dressed up as a cynical remedy.
The recipe is built almost entirely from negatives. The first woman is one whom "gold nor honor ne'er had power to move". The second has tears that "ne'er her true-love crost" and never "long'd to be a bride" at fifteen. A third never answered back when scolded: "being chid, did never word reply". The word "ne'er" or "never" keeps turning up, and the effect is of a list of things that have never happened. Even the sighs have a strange origin, since they must be collected from a woman "giving up the ghost" because she has died of grief for her husband. The pronouns are slippery, too. The "her" of the first eight lines may be one paragon or a type, and she is never named. The speaker seems to be listing the virtues a man might demand of any woman, and those demands sound faintly ridiculous once they are boiled down to ingredients. The picture is not flattering to women, but it is no kinder to the man who wants such a creature.
The last ingredient is the funniest. A "thrice-married" woman must contribute her prayers, and she is one who "did bequeath / A legacy to stale virginity". A woman married three times who leaves money to virginity is a contradiction in terms. The word "stale" turns the gift into a sneer, as though virginity were bread left out too long. By this point the reader knows that the shopping list is hopeless.
The form helps the joke along. The poem keeps to the English sonnet pattern of three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and it runs in loose iambic pentameter. Because it follows this pattern, the sonnet might seem to promise a turn between octave and sestet, but the recipe never pauses. Relative clauses beginning with "that" are stacked one after another, so the poem reads like a list being read aloud, and the speaker barely stops for breath until line 13. Some lines stretch past ten syllables. "The powder of her heart dried, when she is dead" is crowded in its middle by "heart dried", which makes the line sound heavy and clotted, as if it were being ground in a mortar. The verbs "dried", "mixt" and "boil'd" belong to the kitchen or the apothecary's shop, and they sit oddly beside the sighs and tears. The cure involves a corpse's heart, a dying woman's breath and a dead husband, so the grotesque and the comic are mixed together.
The couplet arrives with a shrug: "If this receipt have not the power to win me, / Little I'll say, but think the Devil's in me." "Receipt" is the old word for recipe, and "win me" means win me over, or cure me. Since the recipe cannot be made, failure is guaranteed. The speaker will keep quiet and privately conclude that he is possessed, since nothing but a devil could explain a love this stubborn. The rhyme of "win me" with "in me" ties the cure and the curse together in one sound.
The poem is worth reading because it turns the love sonnet inside out. The usual sonnet lover praises his beloved and suffers for her. Here he hands out an anti-praise, a catalogue of what women supposedly are not, and ends up mocking his own condition as well. Behind the cynicism, the sonnet admits that the speaker is trapped.