Drayton's sonnet is a love poem that spends thirteen lines saying what it will not do. Its target is the showy habits of love poets, who open with "flames and lightnings," call on Heaven or Hell, and drag the Fates and Furies in to witness their suffering. The speaker steps back from all this with a shrug. Elysium is "too high a seat for me," he won't wade into Styx or Phlegethon, and even the Muses are "but too wanton." He wants none of it. The only thing he will call on, in the last line, is "my divine Idea."
The sonnet's form carries the argument. It follows the English pattern of three quatrains and a couplet, rhymed *abab cdcd efef gg*, and each quatrain does one job. The first describes the others, with "Some... Some..." repeated like a pair of eye-rolls. The second turns to "I" and rejects the grand destinations of the classical afterlife, high and low, along with the Muses. The third shifts from refusal to fear. The couplet then resolves everything in one plain statement. The verse is a steady iambic pentameter ("Some, WHEN in RHYME they OF their LOVES do TELL"), and that evenness helps the comedy. The lines march on calmly while the speaker lists the horrors he is too nervous to face.
The humour is the most interesting thing here. Drayton claims to reject mythological machinery, yet the poem is crammed with it: Elysium, Styx, Phlegethon, the Muses, Erinnys, Ate, Hecate, Apollo, Minerva, Astraea. He rejects the clichés by reciting them, so the poem turns into a roll call of exactly the show-off material he says he has no use for. That is clearly a joke at the expense of poets who pile on names, and probably at his own, since he is plainly well versed in the material. The third quatrain makes the speaker a cheerful coward. "Spiteful Erinnys frights me with her looks," he says, and "my manhood dares not with foul Ate mell" (meddle). He "quakes" at Hecate's "charming books," meaning her books of spells, and he imagines even Apollo's cell, the home of poetry itself, as a place full of "bugbears," or imaginary bogeys. The tradition that should inspire him becomes a haunted house.
The sounds are as overblown as the claims they mock. "Fates and Furies" and "flames and lightnings" use the loud alliteration of dramatic oratory, and "exordiums" is a pompous word for the opening of a speech. It suggests that all that fire is only throat-clearing. Line 8 changes the mood with its clipped, blunt phrasing: "Like they that lust, I care not; I will none." The commas break it into short refusals. Then the couplet slows and softens. "Astraea" and "Idea" make a feminine rhyme, each ending on an unstressed syllable, so the poem trails off gently instead of closing with a bang. The phrase "call on" also comes back. Earlier, "Some call on Heav'n"; now "I call on my divine Idea." The verb is the same, but the object has changed from a distant heaven to a personal devotion.
That last word is worth pausing on. "Idea" might name a particular beloved, or an ideal of beauty, or both, and the poem leaves the question open. "Divine" gives her the status the other poets reserve for gods, but without their special effects. Judging by the poem alone, the speaker's praise is meant to sound simpler and more sincere than theirs, though it comes wrapped in a very learned joke.
This is why the sonnet is worth reading. It shows a love poet being self-aware, mocking the conventions of his own craft while still using them. Sincerity here is a performance, and a witty one, because the speaker has to show off his learning in order to claim he is not showing off. It is also easy to enjoy at school level. Anyone who has rolled their eyes at an over-the-top declaration of love will recognise the move, and the final line lands because everything before it has been so crowded. After twelve lines of gods, monsters and rivers of the dead, a single quiet name is all he needs.