Drayton's speaker opens in a crowded room, though the crowd is imaginary. The Muses, the goddesses of poetry, sit around his chair "drown'd in the tears extorted by my lines." It is a boast disguised as a lament. His verse is so sorrowful that it wrings weeping out of divine beings, and "extorted" suggests tears taken by force, as if the poems were a kind of robbery. Yet the one reader he cares about stays unmoved. The lady "disdains to bless" his verse, and the sonnet that follows turns a lover's complaint into a threat.
The threat is clever. His poems have been "strong-built trophies to her living fame," monuments raised to keep her memorable. Withdraw them, and the monument falls. So he vows that his bosom will be the Muses' "hearse," the place where "the world shall now entomb her name." The vocabulary swings from building and life to coffins and burial. The warning behind the grief is that she needs his poetry more than he needs her. There is an irony too. A poem promising silence runs to fourteen lines of speech, and the woman it condemns is never named at all. The burial is already happening as we read.
The form is the English sonnet, rhymed ababcdcdefefgg, in a mostly steady iambic pentameter. Drayton breaks that steadiness at moments of weight. Lines begin on a stress, as in "Muses," "Drown'd" and "Ever," so they land like a sigh or a blow before the regular beat resumes. The first eight lines make a single sentence, and the main verb ("be," in line 7) is held back until the reader has waited through all the weeping. The decision arrives only after the grief has been laid out. The sharpest rhyme is "verse" and "hearse," which ties the poet's art to its funeral in sound as well as sense. "Fame" and "name" close the octave, the two things the lover can now take away.
At line 9 the address shifts, and the audience shrinks. First come goddesses, then "poor senseless walls," then "trees and stones." Each step downward is a step further from anyone who could answer, and that decline is part of the joke. He asks the walls to "enclose my music" and "soften yourselves with every tear that falls," a strange picture of stone going soft, like damp masonry that seems to weep. Behind it sits the charge in line 10: "she is deaf and will not hear my moans." The walls are called senseless, but she is the one who refuses to listen.
Then comes Orpheus, the legendary musician whose song was said to charm even trees and stones. Comparing himself to him is a grand claim, but the myth is bent into something bitter. Orpheus had a great audience, whereas Drayton's speaker has only scenery. The couplet is not a separate, snapping epigram. It spills out of line 12 as one continuing sentence, so the bitterness seems to arrive almost against his will. The trees and stones "seem yet with pity mov'd," and that word "seem" gives away how lonely he is. Perhaps the pity is his own grief reflected back at him. Then the last line lands its blow: "Kinder than she whom I so long have lov'd." Her kindness is ranked below that of rocks, and "so long" adds years of patience to the injury. The rhyme of "mov'd" with "lov'd" sounds a feeling returned, but only by the wrong audience.
What makes the sonnet worth reading is how much it does with a familiar situation, the cruel mistress and the suffering lover. Within fourteen lines the mood moves through self-pity, pride, menace and sour wit. It also plays with the idea that poetry can make a person famous and turns that power into leverage. Whether the speaker means it or is only sulking, the poem lets us see both the wounded lover and the poet who knows exactly what his words are worth.