Most prefaces ask for a reader's patience. Drayton's opens by showing some readers the door. Anyone who comes to these "Loves" looking only for "Passion" should "lay them by" at once and go "turning other books." The title tells us this is a preface to a set of sonnets, and the first four lines work like a shop sign: this is what we don't sell. Even the phrase "Which better may his labor satisfy" is faintly dismissive, as if the disappointed reader were a customer in the wrong aisle.
The second quatrain explains what is missing, and it reads like a list of the lovesick sonneteer's stock props. There are no "far-fetch'd" sighs, no tears wrung from the eye, no sonnets "drest" in "Ah me's." Each word carries contempt. "Far-fetch'd" suggests a feeling imported from somewhere distant and artificial, while "wring" makes weeping sound like squeezing a wet cloth. "Whining" reduces the whole Petrarchan posture to a child's complaint. The joke is that Drayton quotes the cliché in order to mock it, turning a sigh into a plural noun, "Ah me's," as if it were something you could buy by the dozen. Then comes the one positive statement of the first eight lines: "A libertine, fantasticly I sing." In Drayton's day a libertine could simply be someone who refuses to be bound by rules, and "fantasticly" suggests imaginative caprice, so the line sounds like a boast of freedom. Its commas fence the words in, and "sing" gets the last word.
The third quatrain turns from what he won't do to what he is. "My verse is the true image of my mind" is a claim to honesty, but the mind it reveals is restless: "Ever in motion, still desiring change." The rhythm acts this out. Most of the poem moves in steady iambic pentameter, but line 10 begins with a stressed "Ever," which gives it a small jolt before the beat settles. Here "still" means "always," though it is amusing that a word so close to "stillness" sits in a line about never stopping. The rhymes help too. "Change" is tied to "range," and "mind" to "inclin'd," so the sound of the verse binds the poet's temperament to his wandering. "Humours" meant moods or temperaments, and "sportively" adds play, so the speaker roams through every mood the way a child runs through a field.
The couplet widens the claim from the poet to a nation: "My Muse is rightly of the English strain, / That cannot long one fashion entertain." "Strain" can mean lineage, but it can also mean a tune, which suits a poet who has just said "I sing." The last line is a gently mocking national stereotype, the English as people who tire of any fashion. That turns Drayton's rejection of fashionable sighing into something almost patriotic. He is not breaking the rules of love poetry, only being himself, and being English.
There is a delicious irony in the construction. The poem praises change, yet it is built as a tidy English sonnet rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, with a closing couplet that clicks shut like a latch. Its restlessness lives within a very disciplined form. The diction is also plain, mostly short words, with none of the ornate sighing it mocks. The poem practises what it preaches by refusing decoration, even while it uses the most popular love-poem shape of its time. Perhaps that is the real joke: the sonnet is itself a fashion, and the poet who "cannot long one fashion entertain" is happy to wear it for fourteen lines and make it his own.
What makes the poem worth reading is its candour about poetry's conventions. It is a small manifesto in which a love poet admits that love poems tend to repeat themselves and promises something livelier. It sets expectations, telling us to look for variety, wit and shifting moods rather than one long lament. And it shows that an early sonnet could be self-aware and funny while still being a love poem.