The Speaker
The speaker of the poem is Pamphilia, who is the queen of the nation of Pamphilia in The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, the prose romance in which this poem is inserted. Pamphilia is a frequent writer of poetry, and she composes poems to express the secret love she feels for Amphilanthus, the King of Naples. The sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is a series of sonnets and songs written from her perspective about the nature of constant unrequited love, including "Song (Love a child is ever crying)," in which she laments the fact that her feelings demand constant attention but always leave her in despair.
The Beloved
The beloved in "Song" is Amphilanthus, for whom Pamphilia harbors a secret love despite his philandering. Though he is not explicitly mentioned in the poem itself, he is the object of Pamphilia's affections who inspires her to pen the sonnet sequence in the first place. This dynamic of Lover/Beloved is especially significant for Wroth's text, because it inverts the traditional Petrarchan paradigm of male Lover and female Beloved. While the Petrarchists of Elizabeth's reign often composed songs and sonnets about the cruel nature of love, Wroth's Pamphilia adopts a notably maternal relationship to love by characterizing "him" as a child who must be cared for.
Love/Child
The speaker of the poem personifies Love as a crying child who demands attention but abandons his caretaker the moment he is satisfied. For Pamphilia, love is something that one feels compelled to nourish despite the knowledge that it will eventually lead to one's destruction. Because Wroth has her speaker exude a relatively maternal perspective on love, the feeling is also personified as having an innate biological or genealogical pull that ultimately prevents one from making a choice of whether to pay it attention.
Cupid
Cupid is the god of erotic love and desire in classical mythology. The son of Mars and Venus, Cupid is often portrayed as a child or young boy with wings and a bow and arrows that, when shot, causes a person to fall in love with another. In the English Renaissance, Cupid was often portrayed as a mischievous child who snuck up on (male) lovers and found glee in torturing them with unrequited love from their (female) beloveds. In Wroth's poem, Cupid is portrayed in a similar fashion, but the maternal imagery also suggests the speaker feels drawn to the child in an inherent way.
King James I
In many poetic texts from the English Renaissance, it is important to consider the role of the monarch at the time, especially in texts from authors like Wroth who were so involved with politics. A political reading of "Song" would equate "love" with political ambition; thus, Wroth's poem can be read not only as a complaint against the paradoxical nature of love but also a complaint against the precariousness of courtly favor. One may consider that, at the time Pamphilia to Amphilanthus was being circulated, Wroth had lost her husband and was faced with an enormous amount of debt for which she would have had to appeal to King James's court in order to ameliorate. Such a reading of the poem also aligns Wroth with her Petrarchan predecessors who often wrote of the unknowability of both erotic and courtly affection.
