According to WMR the poem was composed in 1854 (1911). There is no hard evidence that confirms or disconfirms that dating. But it must have been written in or before 1863, the date of its first publication. DGR's draft at Princeton has very interesting cancelled readings. One of the Ashley Library notebooks carries two draft texts.

DGR revised his 1863 text slightly when he reprinted the poem in the 1870 , and completely recast the final stanza in the 1881 .

First printed in (1863), an anthology published by Emily Faithfull's Victoria Press.

It was printed again 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) this poem and ten others were grouped as 's 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.

The theme is a recurrent one in DGR's work, and in the pictorial work is epitomized by the picture .

It is perhaps notable that the poem was first published in a book “Printed and Published for the Arts Exhibition for the Relief of Distress in the Cotton Districts”. That DGR would have chosen to give this quasi-mystical poem for publication in such a consciously social and political publication as Emily Faithfull's goes some way toward explaining the connection he wanted to establish and pursue between the personal and the political in his 1870 volume. (1863)

Gregory, II. 115