Summary

The speaker states that love rules over him. Using the metaphor of a military conquest, he pictures himself as a captured city. His beloved continues to encourage him to feel this love, even though she disdains him. Sometimes, her anger makes his love flee. Nonetheless, he states that he is loyal to his love, even to the point of death.

Analysis

This poem is a fairly conventional love sonnet, an early incarnation of the courtly poetry that would become universal during the English Renaissance. It neatly follows the conventions of the genre, from form to subject. It focuses on the topic of romantic love, which is overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) what sonnets are about. It is written in fourteen rhymed lines of iambic pentameter. Critics have long criticized Henry Howard for lacking the wit and rhythmic style of later sonneteers, but what is noteworthy...