Even for Ives (whose manuscripts proved to be awfully hard to sort out) the chronology of this song is difficult to determine. The original poem, by Arthur Symons (1865 - 1945), a British writer, appeared in Ives' hometown paper, The Danbury Evening News, on September 12, 1892.

Ives' manuscript of the song is headed, "Judges Walk (from 1st Symphony)..." The symphony, a student work written under the tutelage of Ives' Yale professor Horatio Parker, does share material with the song in the first movement, which was drafted in 1895.

Ives' editor John Kirkpatrick maintained that the song, at least in sketches, probably existed before the symphony and served as a starting point for the symphony. On the other hand, it is possible to take Ives' title literally and consider that the song might have been based on material drawn from the symphony. Against that point of view is the fact that for the most part Ives put smaller works into the larger works, rather than the reverse.

The imagery of the song is that of an unsettled, windy night on Judges' Walk, with all the world's unrest brooding beneath the stars. Nothing will be said before the Judgment Day...

The song is a departure for Ives, who for now leaves behind his tendency to write songs based on polite drawing room romantic poetry in favor of a philosophical text, and one that expresses darkness and doubt.

Consequently, the tone is stentorian, with active chromatic lines and forceful, even relentless chording in the left hand, a kind of brooding, angry oom-pah bass. At the end the voice, marked "fff," is practically shouting while the piano continues to louden into "ffff."

The chromaticism is not beyond what was then being done in Europe and by the more adventuresome American composers of Ives' generation, but Ives here is surely moving towards his radical path.

In 1902 Ives revisited this song, discarding the Symons texts in favor of lines by Shelley to produce Rough Wind, Kz 51b, which he published as No. 69 of his 114 Songs. The music is substantially the same, but Ives produces a different effect by filling in the interval of the downward fifth in the bass part with a rushing chromatic scale throughout this version of the song. The resulting tonal haze makes the song in that form even darker, more foreboding, and radical.

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