"Going up on Tea Mountain" is about a dutiful wife serving a feckless husband who squanders the family wealth on a months-long sojourn on "Tea Mountain", where he goes to sow his wild oats. She knows that she cannot hold him if he is determined to go, so filled with sorrow, she see him on his way. The woman then falls ill, and gets progressively worse over the course of the year [here the stanza of this song is the lyrics of another song, "In the first month, I watched my beloved go"], until her husband returns. Filled with remorse, he makes vows of penitence if the gods spare her, but she dies in the end. The song is a classic cautionary tale that contrasts the moral virtue of the young wife with the self-indulgence and perfidy of her husband.