The madrigal in Elizabethan and Jacobean England breathed both restraint and passion; it lived in a world of elegance and stylized melancholy. A generation of composers including Thomas Weelkes and John Wilbye cultivated the English courtly taste for a more "serious" and grave kind of madrigal. They left some of the lighthearted fa la la-ing of an earlier generation and wrote secular chamber music that wore its sad heart on its sleeve. Dowland, the ever-sad, could publish a collection of "tears," while the madrigalists again and again called upon their eyes to give forth fountains. Even a relatively tame little poem such as "Dainty fine bird that art encaged there" called forth from the pen of Orlando Gibbons a sharply profiled gem of proper love-lost longing.

In the simple text, the speaker compares his state to that of a small bird who longs to escape the cage in which his mistress has placed him. The only difference, says the poet, is that the bird can sing in the cage and live, while he must sing and die. Gibbons was much better known for his church music, but did produce one volume of English madrigals, including a five-voiced setting of this melancholic text. He sets "Dainty fine bird" for the common five-voiced texture of contemporary English polyphony, with twin soprano parts, but exploits the timbre throughout the short madrigal. The opening, which calls forth the image of the dainty fine bird itself, he sets for just the delicate sonorities of just the four upper voices. The bass only enters on the word "alas," rises stepwise to a pedal tone, and then simply falls into a cadence. The poetic conceits of the inner verses (claiming "prisoner" status for both poet and bird) receive richly dissonant treatment. The composer once again exploits the musical texture at the text "and both singing," as the music takes flight into a high duo for the two sopranos alone. The punchline, "I sing and die" is underscored by a lengthy series of repetitions in all voices but the poor bass, who once again must maintain a tense and lengthy pedal tone until the moment of the final cadence.

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