ABSTRACT
Inscribed on a panel fixed to a wall in the Tower to which it refers, some time after its composition in Apr. 1870. First publ. Pall Mall Gazette, 28 Dec. 1883,p. 2; repr. 23 Nov. 1884 in BSP v 97*. Not collected by B., but repr. twice more in his lifetime, in Sonnets of This Century, ed. William Sharp (1886), and in the ‘Riverside’ edition of B.’s Poetical Works (Boston, 1887) vi 386–7. None of the printed texts after 1883 has any authority, and we do not record their minor variants and misprints. Our text is 1883, slightly emended to take account of the fact that B. almost certainly did not have oversight of the printing (see below, Circumstances of publication).
