Among the many innovations John Dowland brought to the traditions of English song, the notation of his First Booke of Songes (1597) may have been the cleverest. This collection of 22 English-language consort songs was not only the first print in England that ever mixed vocal notation and lute tablature in the same piece. It also pioneered a "table layout" of its parts such that every musical part faced outwards; a group of players or singers circling the book could read from it while sitting comfortably around a table. Thus, a number of different performing combinations were possible for most of the music therein. (This variety may have assisted its vast commercial success; the First Booke went through at least five editions by 1613.) Four singers could perform the piece, or a quartet of viols support a soloist. A single singer could also perform the songs while reading from the lute notation for accompaniment. This combination would almost certainly have been the preferred mode for performing the quaint love-ballad Come away come sweet love.

Of all the songs in Dowland's First Booke, Come away come sweet love presents the lightest and least melancholy aspect. The poet calls out to his beloved in each of three stanzas, urging that they take every joy possible of the golden morning. His language is both explicit ("Teach thine arms then to embrace, And sweet rosy lips to kiss") and pregnant with innuendo ("Playing, staying in the grove"; "Flying, dying in desire"). Only in the third stanza does any hint of shadow arise, in the poet's entreaty that the beloved not cover her beauty with any ornament; does this suggest an aging romance? Dowland's setting subtly reflects the pleasant nuances of his text. The very first phrase opens at an almost breathless speed, already in the midst of its drama. After a climactic expansion of the opening melody, the second phrase shifts meter into a broad 6/4 time. The rhythmic shift, and the impetuously rising harmonic sequence that coincides with it, both swell toward the final cadence, as if to embody the very languorous delights that the text celebrates.

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