Composed in November 1850 when DGR had gone to Sevenoaks to paint with Hunt and Stephens. The fair copy manuscript in the Fitzwilliam Museum was copied in the summer of 1869 when DGR was beginning preparations for the publication of what would be his 1870 volume of Poems .

First printed as part of the pre-publication process for the 1870 , in the Penkill Proofs, August 1869. Those proofs have no special organization of the poetic units. At the next proof stage, the so-called A Proofs (Sept. 1869), this poem is placed in a loosely organized section under the heading . DGR experimented with the order of this section until, in the final proof stage (realized at the beginning of March, 1870) and then in the first edition, this poem and ten others were grouped as integral section of . In the 1881 , this section is detached from and placed under the heading , and two other poems are added to the group.

Doughty (see ,105) reads the poem as “an unconscious or semi-conscious expression of the growing sex-urge of [DGR's] adolescence. That it was at least semi-conscious is suggested by the fact that a little later, in , he again, and consciously, used the fir-wood as a symbol of sexual desire”.