Anyone who attempts to set Quia Amore Langueo to music must have more than his share of courage and integrity. For in this anonymous Middle-English religious lyric there are so many overtones of meaning and of sheer poetic sound that no minstrel's lute, be it never so sensitively touched, can give utterance to them all. The theme presents no difficulty; it is a familiar one. There is the rejection of Christ by Man's soul, Christ's complaint to Man, and the persistent pleading of Christ to be received by Man, “because I languish for love.” As we might expect from the period, the story is told in vivid imagery; the Song of Songs sheds its bright, tinted light upon it. Heavy with allegory, charged with eroticism, the poem is a highly-coloured transmutation of the God-to-Man relationship into lover' language and feeling.