During the 1970s, the influence of 17th-century English poetry resulted in Four Departures for Soprano and Violin (settings of Herrick) and The Pursuit (Symphony No.2), inspired by a quatrain of Andrew Marvell.
Shakespeare mentions “it” in the second quatrain according to Douglas Trevor, “The constancy of love in sonnet 116, the “it” of line five of the poem, is also – for the poet – the poetry, the object of love itself.
Later, philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, Machado's contemporary, developed the idea through the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau struggling for dominance in their mother's womb, as in the article "Rebeca" (1914), which may pre-date Machado's quatrain.
He or she was very resourceful: I copied it from an inscription on a tombstone in the churchyard of Winchester Cathedral, and a military friend then quartered there informed me that a statement once appeared in Fraser's Magazine to the effect that the quatrain commencing "Here sleeps in peace," was written by Dr. Benjamin Hoadley, sometime Bishop of Winchester.
His published collections of poetry comprise mainly ghazals and nazms, but wrote other forms of poetry, like Marsia (elegy) in the musaddas format; Qasida (Panegyric), Hajv (lampoon), Manqibat, Salaam, Rubai (quatrain).
Owing largely to A.C.Cawley's 1957 edition of five of the pageants, and to others' arrangement of the manuscript lines, this is sometimes thought to be a nine-line stanza, with the quatrain containing internal rhyme.