Initially composed in 1871 when DGR was at Kelmscott with Jane Morris, the sonnet was later rebuilt through DGR's notebooks, which contain a series of fragmentary draft texts of various parts of the poem (see notebook 1 and notebook 2 in the British Library (the latter with texts at folios 3v, 4r, and 15r; and notebook 2 at Duke). Two complete holograph draft texts are housed in the Rosenbach Library, one of these the copy-text of the other. These are the earliest manuscripts. The Fitzwilliam composite manuscript of has two copies, a corrected draft just subsequent to the Rosenbach manuscripts, and a fair copy with further corrections (here it was given its received title after passing through the titles “Silence” and “The Silent Hour”). A second fair copy is included in the Princeton composite “House of Life”. The sestet of the sonnet was altered drastically sometime between the scripting of the Rosenbach texts and the Fitzwilliam draft. This important revision emerged through DGR's notebook writings.

No text of the poem appears in the manuscript, but it is likely that the early version of the poem was originally in the group. The book has several pages torn from it.

First published in the 1881 and collected thereafter.

WMR, , 197 Baum, ed., 92-93