"I come now to the supreme drama of my life," Berlioz begins the chapter of his Memoirs in which he recounts his simultaneous discovery of Shakespeare, 11 September 1827, and his sudden, overmastering, obsessive attraction to the Irish actress, Harriet Smithson (1800—1854), the Ophelia of that fated evening, who would call into being the hallucinatory dreamscapes of the Symphonie fantastique (1830) and whom Berlioz would, at last, make his wife in October 1833. "A feeling of intense, overpowering sadness came over me, accompanied by a nervous condition like a sickness" which drove him forth from sleepless nights on long, brooding, disconsolate treks into the fields and forests surrounding Paris. From May through December 1829, he eased his malaise by composing eight Mélodies irlandaises, translated by his friend, Thomas Gounet (1801 - 1869), from the verses of the Irish poet, Thomas Moore (1779 - 1852). Dreamlike and exuberant by turns, and scored for solo, duet, or chorus, these songs, despite their freshness, seldom transcend the emotional range of drawing room ballads. Tacked on as the ninth of the Neuf Mélodies irlandaises, on the other hand, the through-composed "Élégie en prose" is a free, wild, seemingly improvised, dramatic outpouring unlike anything in Berlioz's oeuvre before Faust's great apostrophe, "Nature immense," in La Damnation de Faust (1846), which it foreshadows. The style is declamatory, the accompaniment informed by his recent discovery of Beethoven's piano sonatas. It is a page later in the same chapter of the Memoirs where Berlioz describes a return from one of his desolate rambles to find his copy of Moore's Irish Melodies lying open at the poem "When he who adores thee," paraphrased from the farewell of the Irish revolutionary, Robert Emmet (1778 - 1803), under sentence of death, to his English judges ("Let no man write my epitaph"), and to his love, Sarah Curran. It was the only occasion, Berlioz tells us, on which he was able to capture such intense feeling in music while still under its influence. In the upshot, he could not wait for Gounet to versify the poem but set Louise Belloc's prose translation—hence the title. Though the evidence is mixed and dating conjectural, the moment of composition seems to have been some time in January 1830. During his visit to London over 1847 - 1848, Berlioz was given an intimate description of the circumstances surrounding the poem by Moore's friend, the influential editor, poet, and champion of the Romantic poets, Leigh Hunt (1784 - 1859). He was also gratified to find that the English words of Moore's poem fit his setting readily, and in the third published edition of the Neuf Mélodies, now titled "Irlande" (1849), both French and English texts are given. While Berlioz orchestrated three of his Mélodies irlandaises, he tells us that he broke off and destroyed an orchestration of the "Élégie," reflecting that the exposure of such music, such sentiments, to the ordinary concert-going public would be "a sort of sacrilege."

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