Critics have noted that some of the poems are inspired by 19th-century French poetry and are sexual, and they have responded in various ways, with assessments ranging from "childish" to "pure lyric".

The themes of desperation and the desire to escape bourgeois life, common in Slauerhoff's other poetry, are found in Serenade as well, and two of the poems were used in an obituary for the poet, who died eight years after the publication of this volume.

[1] Van Eijck notes the dependence of many of the poems (and that of his Saturnus) on the French poetry of the 1850-1900 period and considers their genesis to be mostly sexual.

It was published (unchanged from the first edition) in 1982 by Nijgh & Van Ditmar as part of Slauerhoff's collected poetic works.

Mijn belegerd leven lijkt soms een voorloopigeVestiging voor een toekomstig rijk;Ik moet het houden, doe vaak wanhopigePogingen om ontijdig op te brekenAls ik lijd aan 't heimwee naar de zalige strekenDie ik verdedig en zelf nooit bereik.My beleaguered life sometimes resembles a temporary outpost of a future kingdom; I have to defend it, often make desperate attempts to leave my post prematurely when I suffer of homesickness for the blessed realm that I defend, and never reach.

Hendrik Marsman thought that, on the whole, Serenade was bad, full of trivial material, and written in a very pedestrian style—the best that could be said about many of the poems was that they were not awful.