John Dowland embarked upon a musical career at a very young age and was serving the household of the English ambassador to France by the time he was 17. While on the Continent, however, the English Dowland became involved in the "papist" Catholic religion, which hurt the chances of his career advancing back in England. In fact, he needed to spend many years abroad, returning to London to tend his family affairs and publish new music, while he waited for a post in the English court. It did not stop him from writing a stunning array of solo compositions for lute, as well as songs for lute and voice. Sometimes, in his fertile musical imagination, the two genres may even overlap. His joyous little ditty that sets the English poem "Awake, sweet love, thou art returned" also exists as a set of dance music for lute, specifically a Galliard. Yet in 1597, he included the song version in his First Booke of Songs or Ayres, and it has remained a staple of his oeuvre throughout history.

The text of the poem consists of four light stanzas about the joys of requited love. The speaker has not always felt his love returned, but may now exult in the feeling that she has relented her earlier disdain. His despair is turned to "perfect joy." It is fitting that Dowland would choose a Galliard to set the text, as this dance embodies both lightness of step, and some use of cross-rhythms as if the singer were delirious. In addition, some of the Elizabethan experience of the dance could have involved courtship and pursuit. Dowland's melody courses through more than an octave, a wide span among his songs, and it even occasionally skips to its cadential points. The sweetness of the lover's joys are thus perfectly captured in the music. One eminent performer of "Awake, sweet love" has noted the very appropriate fact that this song was one of the first of all Dowland's music to be rediscovered by English performers and enthusiasts.

© Timothy Dickey, All Music Guide