Tavener was looking for the basic approach to a work that had been commissioned by his friend Pat Harrison for the Little Missenden Festival of 1983 when he received a call from his ex-wife in Greece (they had remained close friends). She wanted to share with him her discovery of certain poems by W.B. Yeats. Although Harrison wanted a fifteen-minute companion piece for Debussy's Sonata for flute, viola, and harp. Tavener ended up maintaining the instrumentation but adding a soprano and making an eight-song cycle on Yeats' poems.

The musical material of the piece is Byzantine (or, in "The Fiddler of Dooney" on an Indian raga), but oddly enough the music itself ends up sounding Celtic. Each song is linked by a twenty-five-note bridge for harp, which reads the same backwards and forwards. This is because Tavener remembered being told that there was a twenty-five letter "Byzantine palindrome." The use of this twenty-five note palindrome idea recurs in many subsequent compositions.

When Harrison heard that her fifteen minute instrumental work was now a forty-minute song cycle, she accepted the idea immediately and organized a lecture on Yeats as part of the festival. Critics were rather cool about it after the premiere on October 16, 1983.

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