Oscar Wilde wrote this poem in France shortly after his release from Reading Gaol in May 1897. It is the only new work he published from then until his death in Paris in November 1900 – De Profundis, the extraordinary epic letter Wilde wrote from his cell to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, was only published after his death. He never returned to England and was not allowed to see his two sons again. The experience of gaol devastated him: ‘…life, that I loved so much – too much,’ he wrote in exile, ‘has torn me like a tiger’. He had brought a libel action against the Marquis of Queensbury, father of Douglas, for calling him a ‘sodomite’ [sic] but it was overturned and in May 1895 Oscar found himself tried and convicted of this offence: his sentence was two years imprisonment with hard labour.

The leading actors in one of Wilde’s plays gave a party to celebrate his conviction; some accounts talk of people gathering to dance in the streets. The composer Dalhousie Young wrote a bold pamphlet Apologia Pro Oscar Wilde arguing that relations between consenting adults were not a fit subject for the law to censure but for most people it seems that Oscar had got what he deserved. Crushing as the experience was, he found an empathy with the other prisoners’ sufferings that wrung out of him this last cry of pain. From inside the place of his sorrow, built on the site of the desecrated Reading Abbey, he wrote to his friend Robert Ross: ‘…on the other side of the prison wall there are some poor black soot-besmirched trees which are just breaking out into buds of an almost shrill green. I know what they are going through. They are finding expression.’