The eighth book of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's West-Östlicher Divan, Das Buch Suleika, moved Franz Schubert deeply when he got his hands on a copy shortly after its publication in 1819, and he lost little time finding melody to suit the verses in it. In the early 1820s, he selected two of Das Buch Suleika's 14 love poems and set them to music; these are now known as Suleika I (D. 720) and Suleika II (D. 717). The story of Goethe's Suleika poems is an involved one, and it turns out that the attribution to Goethe of the two poems used by Schubert in his two Suleika-Lieder is not entirely accurate. In late September 1815, Goethe met his current love interest, Marianne von Willemer, in Heidelberg for an intense three-day rendezvous, and it was in fact Marianne von Willemer who put to paper the poems of D. 717 and D. 720. Goethe revised the poems, with her approval, and included them in the West-östlicher Divan amongst the other poems of Das Buch Suleika.

It isn't entirely clear when Schubert composed Suleika II, D. 717; it seems either to have been written around the same time as Suleika I—the spring of 1821—or three or four years later. The song is less celebrated than its companion D. 720, perhaps because it is a less voluptuously expressive piece of music than is Suleika I. The two songs were published at different times, and there is no evidence that Schubert really intended them to be heard in succession; yet in one important way they are an indissoluble pair—the poem of Suleika I was written immediately before Goethe and von Willemer met in Heidelberg, while that of Suleika II was crafted immediately after they parted—never, as it turned out, to see each other again. That the two songs differ in sentiment comes as no surprise at all.

Still, Suleika II is not in any way a despondent song, since in the poem Marianne von Willemer maintains the hope of meeting again (only if "I had no hope of ever seeing him again" would she "die of sorrow"), and a sparkling B flat major is heard through most of the song. Suleika I is addressed to the "east wind"; Suleika II, the other side of the coin, is addressed to the "west wind," begging that it bear tidings of Marianne/Suleika's parting sorrows back to her beloved.

Von Willemer's five stanzas of verse are shaped into two broad sections of music. The first comprises stanzas one through three and is set in a lithe, moderate-tempo 2/4 time; the second comprises the final two stanzas and is reorganized into three beats per bar. The first "half" of the song is ternary in design, with the first and third stanzas being sung to more or less the same music and the second offering a bit of contrast by moving up into the dominant and finding room for a salty syncopation in the piano left hand. The first word of stanza four is "hurry," and Schubert does just that by calling for a slightly quicker tempo and essentially halving the length of each breathless group of sixteenths in the piano accompaniment.

The poems of the West-Östlicher Divan are written in a style that owes something to Eastern literary tradition, and the characters of Suleika and her lover Hatem are part of this adopted literary legacy. Schubert, however, happily makes no effort to insert any garish, fake "orientalisms" into his natural Viennese style.

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