Normally, when a war ends, peace begins. Wyatt's speaker isn't so lucky: "I find no peace, and all my war is done." The fighting is over, yet the calm never arrives. That gap between what should happen and what does happen sets the pattern for the next thirteen lines. The poem is about love as a state of total contradiction, where every feeling comes with its opposite attached and the speaker can neither explain nor escape it.
Wyatt is usually credited with bringing the sonnet into English, and this poem is a version of Petrarch's Italian sonnet "Pace non trovo." The stack of opposites is part of that inheritance, but the English poem doesn't read like a polite exercise. Its short, blunt sentences, "I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice," sound like someone reporting symptoms to a doctor who can't help.
The form helps. The first eight lines rhyme ABBA ABBA: done, season, prison and occasion on one side, ice, arise, wise and device on the other. To modern ears some of these are approximate, since pronunciation has shifted. The final six lines pair plain with pain and health with death, and myself and strife make a looser match. The poem also doesn't end on the neat rhyming couplet many later English sonnets made familiar. "Death" and "strife" don't rhyme with each other, so the ending feels unfastened, which suits a mind that can't settle. The rhythm is roughly iambic pentameter, but it is rugged, and heavy pauses inside the lines keep stopping and restarting the voice. It sounds like someone catching his breath between admissions.
The imagery is built from physical impossibilities. The speaker flies "above the wind" yet cannot rise, and he has "nought" while claiming "all the world." The prison image is the most unsettling. Something "loseth nor locketh" and still "holdeth me in prison / And holdeth me not." The grammar tangles as the idea does: a jailer who neither locks nor unlocks, a captivity with no visible bars. That captor is never named. The poem points at it only as "that," and the judging-by-the-text reading is that this means love or the beloved, though Wyatt refuses to say so. Then come the senses: "Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain." Eyen means eyes and plain means complain, so the speaker perceives and protests with none of the equipment for it. His suffering is vivid but inward and silent.
Look at the small words, too. "Yet" and "and" do the hinge work again and again ("yet can I scape no wise," "and yet of death it giveth me occasion"), joining opposites without ever resolving them. Meanwhile "I," "me" and "my" saturate the poem. The only hint of anyone else is the single word "another" in "I love another," followed at once by "I hate myself." The self is the real battlefield. The line "I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain" makes the point grimly, with a man nourished by the thing that hurts him.
The final line explains the whole structure: "my delight is causer of this strife." The speaker isn't juggling two separate feelings, one good and one bad. He has a single feeling seen from both sides, which is why "both life and death" displease him. He wants neither to live nor to die, because the pleasure and the pain come from the same source.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It helped establish the sonnet in English and showed that fourteen tightly rhymed lines could hold a mind in conflict. Its piled-up paradoxes became a familiar pattern in love poetry, but here they still feel earned, because the poem never offers a way out. It simply ends in the middle of the contradiction.