"Song (Love a child is ever crying)" appears in Lady Mary Wroth's sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, published in 1621 as a companion text to the prose romance The Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus features more than 80 sonnets, often divided into groups by songs of varying length and form.
The poem is loosely representative of the genre of the poetic "complaint," in which a single speaker laments a lost or unrequited love. In it, the speaker Pamphilia compares love to a petulant and elusive child in order to demonstrate the precariousness of her situation. In love with the inconstant Amphilanthus, Pamphilia uses the metaphor to express the importance of cautiousness and care that must go into nursing a secret affection. Ultimately, the poem presents love as a cruel but compulsive emotion that fosters both joy and pain.
The poem is rather circular in its content, expressing disappointment with love from the first stanza to the last. It is also, like many of Wroth's poems, in conversation with the Petrarchan poets of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These Petrarchists like Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare wrote a number of sonnets and other poems about the paradoxical experience of love. The poem is also emblematic of the themes in the larger text of Urania, in which Wroth's speaker adopts a maternal perspective toward love, relying on the classical image of the child Cupid as the mischievous "little god" of love.
A second reading of the poem subscribes to the new historicist assertion that "love is not love" in Renaissance literature. This school of criticism argues that "love" in early modern English poetry was actually analogous to political ambition, as many of the Petrarchan writers were also prominent political actors. In Wroth's case, this reading frames the poem as a commentary on the precarious position of those seeking political favor under King James I.
