Two travellers share an inn and pass the evening swapping proverbs. That is the whole scene of Drayton's sonnet, and the twist is that one of the travellers is Love himself. The speaker, a hopeful lover, arrives armed with sayings that urge action. Love, oddly, answers with every caution going. Neither gives way, and the poem ends where it began, with two fools going their separate ways.
The argument works because proverbs are slippery. "Who spares to speak doth spare to speed" says the timid get nowhere. "Fair words make fools" says talk is a trap. "Fortune assists the boldest" meets "A hasty man ne'er wanted woe." Each line is sensible on its own, and each is cancelled by the next. Drayton shows how folk wisdom can be recruited for either side of any quarrel, so that it comforts without ever settling anything. The central idea is that a lover who tries to reason his way through desire finds only stalemate. Because Love argues against the speaker, one could read him as the speaker's own doubts given a voice. That is an inference, but the poem's even-handed trading of blows invites it.
The form is the English sonnet: three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef, then a couplet. Drayton lets the structure stage the contest. Almost every line is one move in the game, the speaker's proverb and then Love's, in strict alternation, so the quatrains read like volleys across a table. The speech tags ("quoth I," "saith he," "I reply") are squeezed inside the iambic pentameter and keep changing position. In line 5 "quoth I" closes the line, while in line 6 "saith he" interrupts it: "As well," saith he, "too forward as too slow." That shifting keeps the metre from turning sing-song and makes the verse sound like overheard talk. The archaic "quoth" and "saith" add the flavour of a tale told by the fire. There is also a small joke in the rhymes. Line 5 ends on the word "I," which rhymes with "reply" two lines later, so the speaker's own pronoun lands on the rhyme, as stubborn as the man himself.
The imagery is modest and drawn from everyday dealings. "Labor is light where Love doth pay" makes Love an employer, and desire a wage. Love's retort, "Light burden's heavy, if far borne," turns that cheerful labour into a long road with a load on one's back, which suits a poem about travellers. The speaker's "The main lost, cast the bye away" seems to borrow the language of gambling: once the big stake is gone, throw away the small one. If so, the lover is at his most reckless just where he sounds most resolute. Love's final jab, "You have spun a fair thread," is sarcastic. It suggests the speaker has talked himself into a tangle.
The couplet is where the poem becomes more than a clever exchange. Early on, the two "each other entertain," a word that suggests hospitality and amusement. By line 13 they have "each other thwarted." The same pair of words, "each other," now carries obstruction instead of company. Then comes the verdict: "Fools as we met, so fools again we parted." Love's earlier dig, "Fair words make fools," returns as a judgement on both of them, and the "we" matters, because Love is no wiser than the man he mocks. The line is also built like a mirror, with "met" balanced against "parted" and "as" against "so." It echoes the opening "As Love and I," so the poem closes the circle it began.
A sonnet's final couplet often delivers a turn or a lesson, and here the turn is that nothing turns. No one learns anything and no proverb wins. That refusal is the poem's wit, and it is also its honesty. Drayton takes the familiar figure of Love as a personified companion and puts him in an ordinary inn, bickering like a quarrelsome friend. The result is a poem that laughs at lovers' reasoning, including its own speaker's, and ends on a shrug rather than a moral.