Summary
Pamphilia, the speaker of the poem, announces that love is like a crying child, but her assertion becomes a warning as she goes on to explain that the child will flee the moment you indulge him and that he is constantly in need of more and more attention. The next stanza repeats the idea that the child is greedy for more, while also cautioning that he is prone to telling lies and breaking promises, an argument that is emphasized in the third stanza when the speaker associates the child with flattery, cozening, and deception.
The speaker then switches perspectives slightly to discuss the "virtues" and "gifts" of the child, only to announce that his virtues are the characteristics previously described, and his gifts amount to even less. In the concluding stanza, the speaker compares the child to a feather in his constancy and a pack of wolves hunting ferociously for prey. Finally, the speaker concludes by warning the reader, once again, to leave a crying child crying.
Analysis
The poem is structured much like an argument. The speaker announces her opinion (love is like a crying child) and proceeds to support it with various pieces of evidence. While each example of love's cruelty is distinct, the poem is highly repetitive in its nature, citing a number of similar moments of wrongdoing throughout. This repetitive aspect highlights the ultimate psychological stasis of the speaker: she is "stuck" in this complaint and sees no way to progress forward while she is overcome by unrequited love.
The first stanza of the poem introduces the conceit, or extended metaphor, that love is personified in the form of a crying child. Such a comparison was not so uncommon in the early modern period, when many poets categorized "love" in terms of antiquity and the mythological representation of Cupid as a young, mischievous child. What is notable about Lady Mary Wroth's personification, however, is that the speaker places herself in the position of the parent or mother, noting that the child is "Never satisfied with having" (4). As such, Wroth's seemingly conventional complaint about love actually provides readers with a perspective markedly different from her male predecessors of the late sixteenth century: while they tended to characterize love as an inconvenient interruption to their lives, Wroth's speaker is both disturbed by the presence of love and obliged to care for and nourish it.
This duality in the speaker's psychology carries on through the rest of the poem, and in stanza two the speaker begins to criticize love not only for its insatiable appetite but also for its more classical representation of trickery. When the speaker asserts that "What he promiseth he breaketh / Trust not one word that he speaketh" (7-8), she creates tension between the concept of a crying child in need of care and a duplicitous villain who will scorn whoever provides for him. In this way, the second stanza begins to complicate the metaphor by portraying the child as simultaneously helpless and capable of manipulation. Again, such a tension focuses on the paradoxical nature of erotic love, in which it demands one's attention only to punish and deceive.
Love's duplicity is expanded upon in the third stanza when the speaker cautions her reader to avoid his "cozening" and "flattery" (10). Noting that "He vows nothing but false matter" (9), the speaker both maintains the classical image of Cupid as a trickster and moves beyond that comparison to one that is much darker and unsettling. Not only is love, according to the speaker, comparable to the mischievous child, it is also a highly sophisticated villain that can lure one in with false promises. Thus, this image of love is not so much infantile as it is Satanic, recalling the story of the fall of man from Genesis and Satan's convincing Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. By this point in the poem, Wroth has created an understanding of love that relies not so much on classical precedent as it does on Christianity—something few sonneteers engaged with in their Petrarchan endeavors.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker enters into what appears to be a slight shift as she mentions love's "gifts," "virtues," and "favours" (15-16). The stanza, however, quickly returns readers to the ongoing argument for love's cruelty when it announces that one may consider the examples already given as love's kindnesses. Thus, the speaker suggests that these aspects of love already discussed are far from the pain it is capable of inflicting, and just as the poem nudges readers toward a potential moment of redemption, it returns them to the melancholy lament and stasis of the speaker.
As the poem closes, this "return" to the beginning is completed by the repetition of the language in the first stanza. "As a child then, leave him crying," the speaker warns, "Nor seek him so given to flying" (19-20). The conclusion of the poem is unsatisfying in that there has been no growth and no change from the opening: the speaker has remained firmly and miserably in pain for the entirety of the poem. This lack of change in the poem from beginning to end emphasizes the extent to which the speaker is trapped by her own experience with erotic love, a problem highlighted by the fact that this poem appears in a sequence of more than eighty poems in which the speaker attempts to make sense of her own pleasure and pain.
