Old vs. New
As the speaker challenges the expressions of the "poor fools," she draws a line between what we may consider "old" love and "new" love. The "old" form of love, typically expressed by male sonneteers of the Elizabethan period, is performative and insincere, according to the speaker. This critique is not, of course, only about the experience of love: rather, the speaker uses the difference between old and new to comment on the state of of love poetry in the reign of King James, many years after the genre had fallen out of fashion. In so doing, the speaker offers a literary critique of her (mostly male) predecessors who had previously followed the Petrarchan ideals about love, as well as his poetic technique. By contrast, the speaker's love—and therefore, her poetry—is, she argues, more genuine and less concerned with social and literary decorum.
Erotic Love and Spiritual Love
The early seventeenth century witnessed the vogue of poetry that often conflated erotic experience with religious ecstasy. Popularized by coterie poets like John Donne, this genre of poetry sought to challenge the notion that the divine was markedly separate from one's experience on earth. In Wroth's poem, she presents a similar argument as she distinguishes between love poetry that relies on performance and that which "in the soul...in safety lies / Guarded by faith" (12-13). "True" erotic love, the poem argues, is consecrated by a spiritual component that depends not on how one acts but on how one feels.
Political Turmoil
Since the mid-sixteenth century, England had been in a near-constant state of religious upheaval after the Protestant Reformation. (See the section in this guide on "The English Reformation" for some more background.) English Protestants attacked recusant Catholics for being too invested in extravagant display rather than scripture, and Catholics accused Protestants of abandoning communal worship and regimented services. The tension between Protestants and Catholics (and the sects within both) persisted well into the seventeenth century. It is worth noting that Wroth is writing toward the end of James's reign, when critics began accusing him of sympathizing too much with the Catholic faith (James's mother, Mary, had attempted to steal the crown from Elizabeth and render England a Catholic country once more). Wroth's focus on the difference between "false" and "true" love, therefore, can also be considered a critique of Catholic practices which many Protestants found showy, over-the-top, and insincere. One may deduce that Wroth—who was part of the politically prominent and Protestant Sidney circle—uses an argument about the proper forms of "love" as a coded means of expressing her sentiments about the alleged increased tolerance for Catholics under James I.
