Cruelty of love
The poem is, first and foremost, concerned with the extent to which an unexpressed or unrequited love can cause pain and harm to the lover. Though talking about a child, the speaker develops a tone throughout the poem that cautions readers to beware of the child's "endless folly" (6), "false matter" (9), and "cozening" (10). As such, the cruelty of love is depicted as a paradoxical personification: the child both demands attention and uses that attention to manipulate and inflict pain upon the lover.
Pleasure of love
Because the nature of love is presented as a paradox, the poem also suggests that there is something pleasurable about being in love, whether it is requited or not. The speaker's need to warn the reader to avoid the crying child multiple times indicates that this avoidance is presumably a difficult one. Despite the knowledge that love will ultimately destroy her, the speaker appears to struggle with the strong compulsion she has toward love, which is characterized as something that flatters, cozens, and seduces its "victim."
Erotic precariousness
This theme is a common trope of Petrarchan poetry that was popularized by such early sixteenth century poets like Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Love poetry of the period, especially sonnets, tends to agonize over whether the lover is in favor of the beloved (usually a mistress) or not. In the poem, the speaker paints a portrait of love that reveals its precarious nature, stating, "Please him and he straight is flying / Give him, the more is craving" (2-3), suggesting that the child/love must be handled with tact and care lest he disappear.
Maternity and motherhood
Because Wroth's speaker is Pamphilia, a woman and therefore a different gender from most Petrarchan singers, the role of Cupid as a child is amplified to illustrate the difficulty of ignoring the compulsion toward love. The repetition of warnings from stanza to stanza, such as "Trust not one word that he speaketh" (8) and "As a child then, leave him crying" (19) foster a sense of struggle in the speaker's tone, as there is little argumentative progression from beginning to end. In other words, the speaker is drawn to the child through an innate maternal connection that she must then talk her way out of, an endeavor that will likely be unsuccessful.
Flattery
Flattery is one of the key issues alive in the early modern period, not just from an erotic standpoint of a beloved indulging the lover only to scorn him later on, but also from a political perspective of political agents favored by the monarch. The king kept himself surrounded with a small circle of advisors, and politically-minded writers of the time frequently theorized about how these advisors should conduct themselves. One of the main warnings these writers had for monarchs was to beware of counselors who flatter—that is, agree with the king unconditionally in order to gain favor. In the poem, flattery is associated with the child/love, which suggests the difficulty one may have in identifying when it is occurring.
Political ambition
Along with the political reading of monarchical flattery comes the parallel political reading of erotic precariousness. Often, early modern poets conflated romantic "love" with political ambition, striving to please a mistress (the queen) and often failing in their quest to win her over. Though Wroth inverts the genders of the typical paradigm, her poem is no less rooted in the same political connotations, and the precariousness of caring for the child serves as commentary on the speed at which one can rise and fall politically in the era of King James.
Form vs. content
The formal elements of the poem serve to emphasize the paradoxical pleasure and pain felt under the influence of the child/love that gets expressed throughout. The poem is written in generally regular trochaic tetrameter couplets, creating a pleasing and predictable rhythm that many would describe as "sing-song" or simply a meter that easily lulls a reader into its regularity. Thus, Wroth's use of form showcases the very flattery and hypnotic seduction that she accuses the child/love of using on a desperate lover, inviting the reader to be overtaken by rhythm so much so that she forgets the warnings being expressed in each stanza.
