This formidably complex late work by Charles Ives is listed along with six others as Ives' best songs by his biographer David Wooldridge (From the Steeples and the Mountains, a study of Charles Ives, 1974). All these songs have in common the use of additional instruments besides piano.

The song is a setting of words by Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), an English poet who may have come to attention through the favorable essay Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about the man and his writing.

The text comes from Landor's Hellenic Dialogues. They represent the divergent views of the great playwrights Sophocles and Aeschylus ("the father of tragedy") on the subject of monarchy. Sophocles' opinion, which begins "We also have our pests of them which buzz around our honey, darken it, and sting," and ends, "Many charms hath she [Sicily]. But she hath Kings, accursed be the race!"

Aeschylus is portrayed as responding, "But where Kings honour better men than they, Let Kings be honoured too…."

The song is scored for voice, piano, and string quartet. The first eight measures of the song are an introduction based on a fugue Ives wrote working with the classical Greek modes. While the piano plays soft chords as a background, the first violin begins the fugue more loudly. The tempo is Adagio. It is characteristic of the fugue subject that each voice drops suddenly from forte to pianissimo after one measure.

The fugue is highly unconventional; the pitch levels of the first note of each entry are D#, C, A, and B-flat. When all four strings have subsided to a quiet dynamic, the piano starts getting louder, virtually overwhelming the strings. By the time there is a sudden shift in tempo to Allegro the piano is prominent and the strings become a kind of "background" or "shadow" part. All the parts of the texture are rhythmically independent: at one point the piano is playing twelve against eleven while the voice has ten, and the strings eight, six, four, and one, respectively.

In addition to being poly-rhythmic (as described in the last paragraph) the music is polytonal and even polymodal, for each of the four strings plays in one of the traditional "Greek" or "Church" modes, using, throughout its range, the notes of the base octave of the Dorian, Phrygian, Hypolydian, and Mixolydian modes, while at one point a line in the piano part is also Hypophrygian.

The texture of the music is dense, the mixture of the several tightly disciplined lines approaching confusion when added together. This results in a strangely transcendent effect

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