Michael Drayton's speaker sits alone, hoping for quiet, and gets a domestic row instead. Two personified figures, Love and Reason, fight over him while he reports the scene. Love "bids me go and write"; Reason "plucks back, commanding me to stay." Grammatically the poet is the object of both verbs, a man tugged by the sleeve from two directions. Drayton was a contemporary of Shakespeare, writing when sonnets about love were fashionable, and he turns the genre on itself. The sonnet is a small comedy about where love poems come from.
The quarrel is built like a legal dispute. Reason's opening claim is cheeky: she "doth still direct the way," and without her Love "were unable to endite," meaning to compose. Even passion, she says, needs sense to put its words in order. Love loses her temper. She is "vexed at the spleen," a word for ill humour, and scorns Reason's "maimed argument," as if the logic had been crippled. Her sharpest charge is that Reason is "wanting to invent." The word is double-edged, since "wanting" means both "lacking" and "wishing," and "invent" is the poet's gift for finding things to say. Reason cannot invent, Love says, in places "where she with Love conversing hath not been." Reason knows only what she has experienced, and she has never really talked to Love.
By the third quatrain the two are trading insults. Reason answers with "coy disdain" and laughter at Love's "folly." Love then condemns "Reason's reason wholly," and the repeated word is neat. The personified figure and her faculty collapse into one, as though Reason were being judged by her own standard. Love's verdict is an image from the marketplace: Reason is weighed and found "too light by many'a grain." The supposedly weighty, sober partner turns out to be the featherweight, which is the joke at the heart of the poem.
The form carries the argument. The rhyme scheme is abba cddc effe gg. Each quatrain wraps its rhymes around one another rather than alternating them, as many English sonnets do, so each feels like a closed round of the fight: claim, counterclaim, a new stand-off. The couplet then breaks the pattern and settles the matter. Its rhyme, "remove" and "love," looks tidier than it sounds to a modern ear, but it lets the final words land on the winner. The metre is iambic pentameter, bent in places. Line 5, "Love, growing angry, vexed at the spleen," has only nine syllables on my count and limps as if irritated. In line 12 the contraction "many'a" is squeezed in to keep the line to ten syllables, a small act of discipline in a poem about indiscipline.
The ending makes the most of its echoes. Reason, "put back," moves "out of sight," so she is treated exactly as she treated the poet in line 2. The final line, "Love alone picks reason out of love," also echoes "plucks," and it can be read two ways. Love may select whatever reason she needs from within herself, or she may sort reason out of love as one picks a stone from grain. Either way, the capital letter has gone in the text given here. Reason is no longer a person with a voice but a quality absorbed into love. Love does not banish reasoning; she keeps it and takes the credit.
That is where the poem turns on itself. Reason claimed that Love could not compose without her, and the sonnet half-proves it. It is carefully argued, balanced quatrain against quatrain, and its puns depend on clear thinking. The poet also did what Love told him and wrote. The poem declares that love wins while quietly showing how much intelligence it took to say so.
That is why the sonnet is worth reading. In fourteen lines it dramatises the old contest between head and heart, makes it funny, and lets the form comment on its own argument. It is a love poem about the writing of love poems, and it knows its victory is not as clean as Love pretends.