This 67-line elegy was first published in 1601, as one of a group of commendatory poems attached to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr, or Rosalind's Complaint.

The title page continues: 'Allegorically shadowing the truth of Love, in the constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle'. After a description of the other contents of the book, we read: 'To these are added some new compositions, of severall moderne Writers whose names are subscribed to their severall workes, upon the first Subject: viz. the Phoenix and Turtle.' One of the pieces is signed William Shakespeare, but it has no separate title.