DGR wrote the sonnet around 21 July 1854 (see his letter to Allingham of 23 July 1854, Fredeman, , 54. 55 ). The earliest text we have is the fair copy DGR sent to Allingham in a letter of 23 July 1854.

Allingham's criticisms of the first text of the sonnet led the poet to offer some early revisions in another letter to his friend (see his letter of c. 1 August, Fredeman, , 54. 57 ). When DGR later printed the poem in the he brought it substantially into its received state. Only a few small changes were made in the proofs in 1869-1870.

One other manuscript survives: a corrected copy (which is also cancelled through by DGR) in the Fitzwilliam composite sequence.

First printed as Sonnet VI in the initial sequence of sonnets DGR published in the (March 1869), the preparatory step toward his project for . The sonnet was printed again in the Penkill Proofs in August and kept through all prepublication texts until its publication in the 1870 . This sonnet is numbered XLIII in as published in the 1870 volume, and XCI in the sequence as published in 1881.

The sonnet's octave has commonly been read as an emblem of “the two antagonistic loves of Rossetti's tragic experience” (see Baum, , 206), though Baum himself rejects such a reading because the 1854 date of composition precludes it. But DGR pointedly recovered early sonnets for in order to expose their latent, even prophetic, meanings. In this perspective the poem's autobiographical urgency is hardly to be resisted. In this reading, the “two men” (line 1) are best seen as two aspects of DGR himself—and hence they forecast the sonnet , which comes soon after.

WMR offered another autobiographical reading that focuses on DGR's pursuit of a double career, as a painter and as a poet.

Baum, ed., 205-207 WMR, 251-252