The work was commissioned by the Revd Walter Hussey for the 53rd anniversary of the consecration of St Matthew's Church, Northampton.
Finzi assembled the text from two poems of Richard Crashaw (c. 1613–1649), an English poet of the Metaphysical tradition of John Donne and Thomas Traherne.
These two poems, Crashaw's "Adoro Te" and "Lauda Sion Salvatorem", themselves constitute poetic translations of Latin hymns by St Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274).
Finzi did not set the entirety of both poems; he instead excerpted and re-ordered selected stanzas from Crashaw's original to create a composite text for the work.
The highly sectionalized form follows the stanza divisions of the text, featuring episodes of homophonic textures as well as short stretches of polyphony.