Love, in Michael Drayton's sonnet, arrives as a demonic possession. The speaker is haunted not by a woman but by her beauty, which has come loose from her and set up house inside him as an "evil spirit". It tempts him "to each ill" and will not give him "one poor minute's rest". It speaks in him "whether I sleep or wake". When he tries to drive it out, it punishes him with "greater torments", and by the third quatrain it is laying out his despairs and urging him toward "a sudden death". The central idea is that desire can feel like an invasion, something done to the lover rather than something he does. The closing couplet then complicates the complaint: the spirit is "good wicked", a "sweet angel-devil". The speaker is tormented, and he cannot quite wish the torment away.
The grammar enacts this helplessness. Nearly every verb has the spirit as its subject and the speaker as its object: it haunts *me*, tempts *me*, tortures *me*, hastes *me*, and finally tempts *me* again. The speaker barely gets a verb of his own, and the one he does get, "I try", is immediately cancelled by the spirit's counterattack. Even his possession is passive: he has "been long possest", as if the event happened to him long ago and he is still catching up with it. Line 1 opens on "still" (meaning "always"), and line 13 returns to it with "I am still provok'd". The poem ends where it began, with no progress and no escape.
The form supports this sense of being trapped. It is an English sonnet in iambic pentameter, rhyming *ababcdcdefefgg*. The three quatrains tighten like a screw. The first describes the haunting, the second records the failed exorcism, and the third names the spirit's worst temptation, death. Some lines are heavy with monosyllables. In "Nor gives me once but one poor minute's rest" the little words crowd together, and the reader almost feels how stingy the spirit is with relief. Line 7 twists its word order ("it me doth take"), as though the sentence itself has been seized and turned around. The rhymes sometimes press on a pair of near-opposites: "tears" and "despairs" sit together in the same pattern, while "death" and "breath" close the third quatrain with a rhyme that sounds almost gentle.
The imagery works by taking familiar love-poetry exaggerations and making them literal. Tears and sighs were stock properties of the sonnet lover, but here they become methods of suicide: the spirit tempts him "to drown myself in tears" and "in sighing to give up my breath". The balance of "Now…" and "then…" makes the spirit sound like a persistent salesman offering alternatives. I read a faint wryness in this, a speaker who knows how theatrical his suffering sounds, though the poem never lets that irony fully undercut the pain. Another striking image is "Before my face it lays down my despairs". The verb suggests a clerk or prosecutor spreading out evidence, so the spirit is not only a tormentor but an accountant of his misery, making sure he cannot look away from it.
Then comes the couplet, which changes the poem. Until line 13 the spirit has been simply "evil", and a reader might expect a final plea for deliverance. Instead the last line pins together opposites: "good wicked spirit, sweet angel-devil". The hyphen in "angel-devil" fuses the two words into a single creature that cannot be pulled apart. The rhyme of "evil" with "devil" is neat and nearly comic, as if the language itself admits the diagnosis was obvious all along. Notice too that the poem begins "your beauty", addressed to the beloved. The accusation is a compliment in disguise, since the very quality that torments him is the one he has been praising.
This is what makes the sonnet worth reading. It fits a whole love-psychology into fourteen lines: attraction experienced as a force that overpowers the will, pleasure and pain so tangled that "sweet" and "wicked" describe the same thing. The oxymoron at the end is not decoration but the poem's real conclusion. The speaker has tried everything except admitting that he is not sure he wants to be cured.