In Aphra Behn's pastoral dialogue celebrating the marriage of the Earl of Dorset, the shepherdess, Aminta, voices a cynical view of love, ruled by random chance in the figure of Cupid. While it was common for early modern cupids to inspire unrequited love with their darts, Behn favors the figuration of the boy Cupid playing havoc with lovers in a chaotic universe. Dismissed by Aminta, the language of love, god, hearts, soul and Cupid himself are recuperated by the shepherd's later defense of the divine consecration of this couple. These words are major players in Behn's preferred vocabulary for poetry, and they regularly populate the landscape of her verse in varied dynamics of enthusiasm and skepticism.

According to Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn was best known as a poet of love, and evidence of this fame appears in many of the commendatory poems prefixed to her poetic collections of the 1680s. Thomas Creech memorably described the author as “Love's great Sultana” in his much noted prefatory poem to Behn's single-author collection Poems Upon Several Occasions (PSO 1684). There is a strong emphasis in the PSO encomiums on the uniqueness of Behn's representation of passionate love. Compared to the obscene satires and Hudibrastic style of masculine coterie verse, Behn's muse of love is refined and remarkably effective. Creech describes it:

Critics have maintained with evidence that Behn's “new way” of love owes chiefly to her female persona openly expressing sexual desire and eroticism. Behn's song “Love Arm’d” and erotic lyrics, “The Disappointment,” “On a Juniper-Tree” and “To the fair Clarinda, who made Love to me, imagin’d more than Woman,” certainly justify the reputation of eroticism for modern audiences.