Most love sonnets ask us to look at the beloved: her eyes, her hair, her walk. Drayton's asks us to look at the accounts. The speaker has been accused of overpraising the person he loves, of "folly", and he answers with a balance sheet instead of a portrait. His central idea is that value is not fixed inside a thing. It depends on who holds it and whether they know how to use it. The closing couplet says as much: "The circumstance doth make it good or ill."
The vocabulary carries the argument. "Overprize", "expense", "state" (here meaning his means), "rate", "price", "treble gain", "value", "give", "take": nearly every line belongs to buying and selling. The speaker admits he spends lavishly, giving "more than well affords my state", and that onlookers call him "vain" for it. But he points out that his extravagance costs them nothing ("Which yields them nothing at the easiest rate"), while to him it "returns... treble gain". The joke is quietly sharp. Why should people with nothing invested audit someone else's investment?
Against this homely bookkeeping, the poem sets some grander language. He will "oppose my Reason's forces wholly", as though Reason were a general with troops drawn up. The gap between battlefield and ledger is faintly comic, and it gives the speaker a hint of self-awareness. "Folks, that think themselves so wise" is sarcastic, too. "Folks" is a plain, slightly dismissive word, and it suggests he is composed on the surface but stung underneath.
The form is the English sonnet, rhymed *ababcdcdefefgg* in steady iambic pentameter. Drayton uses the rhymes to set accusation beside reply. In the first quatrain "folly" and "wholly" chime: the word thrown at him and the word he uses to reject it. In the second, "vain" rhymes with "gain", so the critics' charge and his answer lock together at the line-ends. The feminine endings of "folly" and "wholly" give the opening a quick, spoken, slightly breathless tone, like someone getting a defence in before being interrupted. Most lines are end-stopped, so the argument arrives point by point, like a lawyer counting on his fingers.
The turn comes at line nine, with "They value not, unskillful how to use". The critics are no longer wicked or foolish, just "unskillful". That is a gentler insult, and it implies that appreciating love is a skill. To a modern ear, "use" sounds cold applied to love. But it is the poem's own logic: worth is only realised in use, and the people sneering have never used it. The third quatrain then squares the speaker against his critics in mirrored phrases: "I that thus take, or they that thus refuse". The question that follows, "Whether are these deceived then, or I?", uses an old sense of "whether" meaning "which of the two". It ends on the lone word "I", and it leaves him standing there, waiting.
The couplet does not actually answer the question. It widens it: "In everything I hold this maxim still." The move from one love to a general rule is clever. If value depends on circumstance, then outsiders cannot judge, and the speaker's case becomes very hard to refute. It is also hard to prove. Nothing in the poem shows the beloved is worth the price, and we never learn a single thing about her. Whether you find that persuasive or slippery is part of the pleasure of reading it. The "thy" in the first line suggests she is addressed directly, though the title points at the critics. The poem may therefore be speaking over her shoulder to a crowd of doubters, or reassuring her at the same time. That is an inference from the pronouns, not a certainty.
What makes the sonnet worth reading is its refusal of the usual romantic furniture. There are no stars, roses or cruel eyes, only a man insisting that he knows what his own heart is worth. Drayton, an English poet of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, shows here that the sonnet could serve as a little courtroom as well as a love-letter. The poem makes devotion sound sensible, even shrewd, and its modest closing maxim carries a lesson that outlasts its commercial metaphors: you cannot fix the price of someone else's happiness.