Most Baroque cantatas are sung by the lover, either pleading for mercy from or declaring, with more or less sincerity, the intent to leave an unresponsive beloved. While there is no characterization as in his I filosofi (in fact, the vocal lines are almost as coaxing as a lover's plea), by setting this text as a duet, often with alternating lines, Carissimi takes a text that might ordinarily be considered a lover trying to talk himself out of continuing to adore a cruel beloved, and instead suggests two friends giving another good advice. Given the strophic setting and that there is no significant change in tone between beginning and ending, he further suggests that this good advice goes unheeded.

Carissimi and various other Italian composers based in Rome during the same time, particularly Luigi Rossi, are considered the bridges between the late Renaissance and the Baroque. In this piece, we see one of the hallmarks of that transition; in the first verse, he added brief runs to suggest movement on the words "spiega" and "vanni" ("spread" and "wings"), but in the second verse, the ornamentation repeats without the same textual underpinning, showing the still-present but waning influence of the idea of music as serving to illustrate the individual words and meanings of the text.

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