Summary
The speaker announces that a group of "poor fools" are unfamiliar with the concept of love. She describes their expressions of love as too showy and performative, composed of kisses, games, and empty promises. True love, she announces at the end of the first stanza, is much more valuable than such a performance would suggest.
In the next stanza, the speaker argues that the same "fools" from the first stanza are incapable of gaining back love after it has been lost or unrequited. She concedes that, though love often arises from looks and physical interaction, there is a deeper love that connects with more than superficial beauty.
This type of love, the speaker continues in the next stanza, is characterized by its inability to be feigned; performative efforts like sighs and tears are not evidence of a lover. Such performances are fickle, and will disappear the moment a lover is scorned by their beloved.
True love, the poem concludes, resides in the soul and is protected by faith. The poem ends on a turn as the speaker announces that kind looks hide many blessings from lovers and beloveds.
Analysis
The poem begins on a note of contention as the speaker addresses a particular group of "poor fools" who are wrong about love. By referring to her antagonists as "fools," the speaker positions herself as markedly more adept at discussions of love. Because the speaker chooses to write in the sonnet form—the classic form of traditional "love" poetry—she also suggests that she is more adept at writing poetry. As such, Wroth uses her female speaker to challenge both the love poetry of the past and the culture of early modern England in which published male poets often followed Petrarchan tropes in their early poetry.
The role of gender becomes increasingly noticeable as the first stanza continues. The speaker describes the love poetry of the past as that which manifested as "fond and outward shows" (2) complete with "kissing" and "toying." It is not clear, however, that the speaker is criticizing this type of love until the end of the third line when she uses the word "gloze" to describe its nature. The term, usually associated with deceit and flattery, allows the reader to understand the speaker's primary argument: that the love championed by the "poor fools" is performative, deceptive, and empty. By contrast, the speaker suggests that she values love as something that goes beyond mere performance by attributing "esteem" to it at the end of the first stanza.
As the poem moves into the second stanza, the speaker continues to criticize the ways of previous poets by introducing theological language into the concept of love. Announcing that such poets are unable to "redeem" lost love, the speaker deliberately associates love with a spiritual state rather than a physical one. Further, when the speaker characterizes "winning" love as "chosen" blows, she invokes the early-seventeenth-century paradigm of erotic and spiritual unity. That is, just as one submits oneself to God (often portrayed as submission to various injuries), love challenges people to submit themselves to knowable pain. The love described in the poetry of the past, therefore, is fickle and incapable of mirroring the spiritual relationship between man and God.
In the latter half of the second stanza, the speaker introduces another common Petrarchan trope: the martial form of love that "conquers" a lover and leaves him smitten. The speaker criticizes this metaphor, too. Conceding that concepts like "love at first sight" are not entirely untrue, the speaker refers to such a conquest as "slight" and unbecoming of the personified love. As such, she suggests that poets who wrote of love in this manner are notably weaker lovers, capable of falling in love with any person who sparks a physical attraction.
The final two stanzas of the poem are characterized by the ironic relationship between the speaker and the Petrarchan tradition she criticizes. It is important to note that, while her speaker accuses the Petrarchists of "feigning" love, Wroth chooses to write the sonnet in a distinctly Petrarchan form: that is, a sonnet composed of an octave (first 8 lines delineated by a particular rhyme scheme) and a sestet (final six lines). The octave of the poem, despite its argument against Petrarchan descriptors, uses an uninterrupted and regular iambic pentameter in rhyme scheme ABBAABBA—identical to the form used by many poets of the late sixteenth century, including Wroth's uncle, Sir Philip Sidney.
However, such "flow" crumbles slightly in the sestet, as Wroth jumbles her rhyme scheme with a number of trochaic and spondaic substitutions. This change is significant because it creates tension between what the speaker argues—that Petrarchan love is performative—and how the speaker argues it—in broken Petrarchan rhyme and meter. In other words, the form of the sestet dramatizes (or performs) the tension between past and present poetry. Thus, while the beginning of the sestet seems to flow logically from the octave in its content, its form suggests that the relationship between poet and predecessors is not so clear as the speaker had previously let on.
The ending of the poem supports this blurring of argumentative lines as the speaker returns to the spiritual element of love. Her assertion that "in the soul true love in safety lies" (12) suggests that there is something secretive and mysterious about "true" love. The final line of the poem, however, asserts that there is also a mysterious element to "kind looks" that "many blessings hide" (14). As such, the poem concludes on an uncertain note, hinting at the possibility that the speaker's critiques themselves could be feigned, while refusing to provide readers with a definitive conclusion.
