Cupid gets shoved off his mother's lap, sits weeping among his broken toys, and is rescued just in time to ruin the speaker's life. Sidney's sonnet, from his sequence *Astrophil and Stella*, turns a love complaint into a small family comedy among the gods, and the sting arrives only in its last six words.
The story is told as a household quarrel. Cupid's mother (Venus, though the poem never names her) is annoyed because Mars has grown "slacker in her love". She wants her son to fire an arrow that will revive his affection, but the boy refuses, afraid of Mars, who "threaten'd stripes", meaning a whipping. Venus loses her temper, "in chafe", and breaks his bow and arrows. The gods are bickering parents and a frightened child, and Sidney's wit lies in how ordinary he makes them. Even the syntax plays along. "His mother dear Cupid offended late" delays the subject until we are halfway through the line, so for a moment we cannot tell who has offended whom.
The sonnet's shape follows the plot closely. The octave is two quatrains on just two rhymes, and the heavy *-ate* chime of "late", "state", "hate" and "sate" gives the quarrel a stuck, sulky feeling. The *b* rhyme should run through "love" and "prove" and "shove", so the pattern calls for a word chiming with them in line three. "More" is what this copy prints, and "move" would fit the sense, so it looks like a slip. The line "Brake bow, brake shafts, while Cupid weeping sate" is made of clipped, repeated syllables, and you can almost hear things snapping. Then the sestet turns on "Till that", bringing rescue and a change of mood. The verbs shift from past to present: Cupid "leaps", "crows", "falls". The rhymes lighten to "bows" and "crows", "play" and "way", and the two "Oh how" exclamations sound like a child squealing.
The rescuer is Cupid's "grandame Nature", and her gift is the compliment at the poem's centre. She makes him "two better bows" from Stella's brows, with "arrows infinite" in her eyes. Curved eyebrows really do look like bows, and bright eyes are an old comparison for love's darts, but Sidney gives the cliché a twist. Stella is Nature's own workmanship, so her face outclasses anything a goddess could make, and her supply of weapons never runs out. Nobody could have praised her more extravagantly, and the praise is hidden inside a joke about a toddler's tantrum.
The turn comes in the final couplet. Restored to power, Cupid behaves like "wags new got to play", mischievous boys with a fresh toy, and "Falls to shrewd turns". The word "shrewd" suggests cleverness but also a sting. Up to now the speaker has been invisible, a narrator telling a myth. Then he appears at the very end in four plain words: "and I was in his way". The grand classical machinery, with its gods, broken weapons and divine grandmother, comes down to a man standing where a child is firing. The tone is rueful and understated, even a little proud, since being hit by arrows made from Stella is its own kind of tribute.
That mix is what makes the poem worth reading. It uses the standard love-sonnet idea that a beautiful woman wounds her admirer, but it refuses to be solemn about it. The lover is not a noble sufferer but collateral damage, an accident nobody planned, and he knows how funny that looks. Sidney manages this in fourteen lines by keeping the myth lively and the rhymes tight, and by saving the speaker's own part for the last moment, when the joke finally lands on him.