The Cuckoo's Calling: literary allusions

I've just started reading Robert Galbraith's novel The Cuckoo's Calling. (As you've probably heard, "Robert Galbraith" is a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling; the book is of course getting a lot of attention now that the secret is out.) My husband, seeing me with the book in hand, said, in mock nervousness, "What are you doing reading a book about adultery?". To this I responded, "Whuh?"

Apparently, for Ross, an English professor, the title The Cuckoo's Calling was a clear literary reference to cuckoldry. In Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, for example, the call of the cuckoo is "unpleasing to a married ear." (For a full explanation, see the entry for cuckoo in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.)

Likely Ross's interpretation will turn out to be relevant at some point in the story -- after all, this is a murder mystery -- but the book begins with the much less potent meaning for the phrase. One of the book's epigraphs is Christina Rossetti's poem "A Dirge," which begins:

"Why were you born when the snow was falling?

You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling,"

In the poem, the call of the cuckoo represents spring, the time of year when male cuckoos call to females (for reasons you can guess). But Rowling, ermm I mean Galbraith, suggests there may be more to it: "The title is taken from the mournful poem by Christina Rossetti called, simply, A Dirge, which is a lament for one who died too young. The title also contains a subtle reference to another aspect of the plot, but as I can’t explain what it is without ruining the story, I’ll let readers work that one out."

If you'd like to hear what a cuckoo's call actually sounds like, the British Library wants to help you.