Most love poems of Drayton's age begin by praising the beloved. This one begins with an accusation. "An evil spirit, your beauty, haunts me still": the sentence names the demon first and reveals its identity only in the middle of the line, so the compliment arrives disguised as a charge. Drayton, an English poet of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era, placed this sonnet in his sequence *Idea*. It takes a stock situation of the sonnet tradition, the lover tormented by a beautiful woman, and gives it a startling frame: demonic possession.
The key word is "possess'd". A lover might hope to possess the woman he adores, but here the possession runs the other way. The speaker is passive from start to finish ("I have been long possess'd", "am I still provok'd"), while the spirit is the grammatical agent, the one that "ceaseth not", "speaks", "lays down" and "hastes". The woman herself never appears. There is no face, voice or gesture, only "your beauty", an abstract force that seems to act on its own. The effect is odd and a little comic: he blames her loveliness for his misery as if it were a lodger he never invited.
The second quatrain turns to exorcism, and it fails. "In me it speaks, whether I sleep or wake" puts the voice inside him, as in accounts of possession, and removes even sleep as a refuge. When he tries "to drive it out", the spirit returns "with greater torments", and the twisted phrase "it me doth take" crams the two pronouns together as if they were wrestling. Resistance only feeds the haunting. The quatrain ends on the stretched, heavy word "extremity", which is made to rhyme with the light, quick "try".
The third quatrain takes the genre's oldest clichés and makes them lethal. Elizabethan lovers wept and sighed constantly, but here the spirit tempts him "to drown myself in tears" and "in sighing to give up my breath". Weeping and sighing, usually just signs of sorrow, have become ways to die. The spirit "lays down my despairs" before his face, like someone spreading out evidence, and "hastes me on unto a sudden death". The rhyme of "death" and "breath" closes the quatrain on a note of finality.
The sonnet's form follows this escalation closely. It is a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and each quatrain adds a stage: the haunting, the failed resistance, the pull toward self-destruction. The steady meter works like a pulse the speaker cannot slow. Line 4, "Nor gives me once but one poor minute's rest", is almost all single syllables, and the clustered sounds of "once but one" make the line itself feel short of breath. The word "still" opens the poem and returns in line 13, where it means both "always" and "yet", so the torment is constant and has not ended.
The couplet is where the poem turns. "Evil" has echoed through it ("each ill", then "every evil"), and the final line seems to promise a last curse. Instead the speaker produces "good-wicked spirit, sweet angel-devil". The hyphens weld opposites into single words that cannot be pulled apart, and "good" and "sweet" are exactly the words the previous twelve lines had no room for. The rhyme of "evil" with "devil" locks the verdict in place, but the verdict is divided. The torment and the sweetness come from the same source, and the speaker does not truly wish to be rid of either. Judging by the tone, there may also be rueful wit here, since a man who calls his beloved's beauty a demon is not entirely innocent in the matter.
That mix of anguish and self-aware humour is what gives the sonnet its interest. It shows a well-worn convention made psychological, since obsession is conveyed through a single sustained image rather than a list of complaints. It also captures something recognisable: the thing we most want to escape can be the thing we cannot bear to lose, and the only honest name for it is a contradiction.