Published at the author's own expense in 1896, after rejection from publishers, the collection contains a cycle of 63 poems. Despite exploring themes of lost love, obsession, pessimism and death, the poems touched English readers and became a bestseller during the Second Boer War and World War I. The collection, set in a half-imagined pastoral Shropshire, includes the well-known poems When I Was One-and-Twenty, To an Athlete Dying Young and Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now.