While Alexander Agricola often used borrowed material in his secular vocal and instrumental songs, he always informed them with his personal style. A popular French Chanson à refrain with text "And who will tell the pain which my heart has?" appears in the Bayeux chanson manuscript; Antoine Busnois, Heinrich Isaac, and Agricola all arranged its text and melody. Agricola's three-voiced cantus firmus setting follows the refrain form of its model, but uses its simple means to a creative end. Agricola sets the opening refrain in straightforward homophony, to rhetorically frame the setting with its question, "And who will tell?" In the contrasting middle section, where the speaker whispers his secret and uncertain love, the voices diverge into contrapuntal textures. The superius and tenor voices mark each line of text with imitation in a different configuration of pitch and time interval. The refrain returns, and Agricola brings back the opening homophony, but also modifies it. Self-indulgent repetitions of the speaker's heartfelt pain lengthen the second refrain to more than double its length. Within the very modest proportions of the chanson, the composer concisely responds to his text, including what may be a closing bit of irony at the speaker's expense.

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