During the period between 1597 and 1612, a collection of some thirty volumes of songs was issued in England by important lutenist song-writers such as Thomas Campian, Robert Jones, John Dowland, Thomas Morley, Philip Rosseter, Thomas Ford, William Corkine, or Francis Pilkinton. From the very beginning, this collection starts to be considered a mere combination of music and verse. It is generally assumed that its authors’ only purpose when making up each of the volumes was to enhance the beauty of the recitation through the simplicity of music. The possibility that these authors could have had a clear objective in mind when selecting, locating, enumerating and organizing the poems within their volumes the way they did, is automatically dismissed. Therefore, these authors’ possible interest in providing their song-books with an internal organization similar to that of the Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles is never taken into consideration. The problem is that, by the time these volumes were written, their authors were undoubtedly acquainted with the arrangement of poems in sequences suggested in the Cycles. Thomas Morley’s First Book of Madrigals to Four Voices (1594) clearly indicates these authors’ familiarity with the Sonnet Cycles. Not in vain, read as a sequence of twenty-four poems, this work by Morley turns out to be the conventional story of three idealized shepherds’ love triangle. Moreover, Morley’s later addition of four poems, two of them to his 1597 Italian Collection and the other ones to a second edition published in 1600, does definitely support the approach to his book of madrigals as a whole story made up out of twenty-four selected poems. In that sense, the main goal of this paper is to carry out a sequenced reading of Morley’s volume, always pointing to the reasons why the additional poems are basic to achieve this goal. Thus, the paper intends to show that Morley, like the rest of the lutenist song-writers of his time, was perfectly aware of the literary devices used in the Sonnet Cycles. There is no better reason for him to definitely make up his mind to combine music not only with "the beauty of the recitation", but also with poems organized in such a way as to reach the listener or reader of his madrigals as a conventional love story.