The sonnet spins a playful myth: Venus scolds her son Cupid for failing to keep Mars passionately in love. When the boy hesitates, afraid of Mars’s anger, she shoves him from her lap and smashes his bow and arrows. Cupid sits weeping until Nature, his grandmother, takes pity. She fashions him two superior bows from Stella’s arched eyebrows and a limitless supply of arrows from her eyes.
Overjoyed, the little god springs up and immediately starts causing trouble again — and the speaker ends up right in his path. The poem’s mood is witty and lighthearted, treating falling in love as a cosmic accident. There’s no grand despair here, only a rueful, half-amused shrug. The speaker has been struck by beauty so potent it feels like divine mischief, leaving him a helpless but almost charmed target.