A man who claims to have lost his mind rarely argues his case so tidily. Drayton's speaker begins by agreeing with his critics: like "other men," he wonders why he "wrest[s] invention" and uses "giddy metaphors" instead of "the path the greater part do go." Then he gives his answer: "I am lunatic." What follows is a mock case history. Madmen, he says, stay fixed on whatever occupied them "when the brain grew sick." He has been in this state for nine years, and his readers must "bear with" him. The poem doesn't say what his fixation is. Sonnets of this period usually circle around love, so a reader might guess that, but that is an inference. What the poem does show is a poet defending his strange style by turning it into a symptom.
The form helps the joke. This is a Shakespearean sonnet, three quatrains and a couplet, in steady iambic pentameter, and the rhymes (*muse/use*, *find/mind*, *twain/brain*) are tidy. The rhythm never stumbles, so the speaker sounds like a lawyer, not a lunatic. The usual turn comes at line 9, but here it arrives early, at "I will resolve you," a phrase that promises logic. The quatrains then work like a syllogism: madmen keep to their last thought, I keep to mine, so I am mad. The one loose rhyme, *lunatic* with *sick*, is a small slackening exactly where the diagnosis is announced.
The word choices are carefully chosen. "Wrest" means to twist something by force, so the speaker admits that his invention, his poetic creativity, is strained and unnatural. "Giddy" means dizzy, but it also means flighty and unserious, which is just what a critic might say about extravagant metaphors. The speaker repeats the charge and then agrees with it. Elsewhere the language is plain. Line 10 is "Reason and I, you must conceive, are twain," and the personification makes Reason a separate person the speaker has fallen out with. Line 11, "Tis nine years now since first I lost my wit," is made entirely of one-syllable words, which makes the confession sound flat and offhand. Whether nine years is literal or just a rhetorical flourish, the poem gives no way to tell.
"Wit" is the most important word, because it means both sanity and cleverness. A poet who has "lost his wit" while writing fourteen such controlled lines is plainly playing. The same double sense runs through "muse," which in the first line means to ponder but also hints at the Muse, the source of poetic inspiration. The "bedlam fit" he mentions refers to the notorious London madhouse, whose name had become a general word for chaos. By saying he is "talking idly" in one, the speaker pretends that his carefully built argument is just babble.
The couplet changes the mood. "With diet and correction men distraught / (Not too far past) may to their wits be brought." "Diet and correction" suggests a regime of discipline, and "distraught" echoes "distraction" from line 8, so the end picks up the earlier idea. The parenthesis, "(Not too far past)," is like a whispered aside, a hedge on the hope. It leaves two possibilities open. Either the speaker is not too far gone to be cured, or he is not yet ready to be. The poem never says which, and that uncertainty keeps the ending from being a tidy retraction.
The sonnet matters because it shows how much a short poem can do at once. It defends the poet's method, makes fun of the critics, and presents the lover or poet as a madman, all within a calm and reasoned argument. Its main irony is that the evidence of madness is the clear thinking itself. A reader who accepts the diagnosis has to ignore everything the form shows, and the poem seems to know this. The speaker gets to apologise for his style and keep it.