This song is a classic of the Elizabethan school of double-entendre, having one, relatively innocent meaning on the surface, and another, far more risqué, hidden in oblique references.

The work's tone is courtly and yet playful, in both text and melody. "Beauty, since you so much desire/to know the place of Cupid's fire/About you somewhere doth it rest/Yet never harboured in your breast/Nor gout-like in your heel or toe/What fool would seek love's flames so low?/But a little higher, but a little higher/There, there, o there lies Cupid's fire." While the most obvious interpretation is that the poet is refering to the lady's eyes (the eyes were key in nearly every Elizabethan love poem, and love is often described as the meeting of eyes), if one takes the injunction to look "but a little higher" from the lady's feet, one can end up considering a point between the lady's feet and her eyes.

The playful note exists not only in the text (the highly unromantic reference to gout, as another example), but in the music, in the repeating rising phrases at each "but a little higher, " a method Campion uses in another ayre, Sweet, exclude me not. The accompaniment is quite simple, mostly chordal, reinforcing the attention to the text.

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