It narrates the emotions of a rejected suitor upon coming to his childhood home, an apparently fictional Locksley Hall, though in fact Tennyson was a guest of the Arundel family in their stately home named Loxley Hall, in Staffordshire, where he spent much of his time writing whilst on his visits.

[1] Tennyson's son Hallam recalled that his father said the poem was inspired by Sir William Jones's prose translation of the Arabic Mu'allaqat.

The University of Toronto library identifies this form as "the old 'fifteener' line," quoting Tennyson, who claimed it was written in trochaics because the father of his friend Arthur Hallam suggested that the English liked the meter.

The poem opens with the unnamed protagonist asking his friends to continue ahead and leave him alone to muse about the past and the future.

The rest of the poem, though written as rhymed metered verse, follows the stream of consciousness of its protagonist as an interior monologue.

He recalls the land where he was born (which he only says is somewhere in the Orient), and lovingly notes its lack of civilisation, describing it as "Summer isles of Eden" and "knots of Paradise."

[4] The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., writing in the Wall Street Journal, quoted the poem to illustrate "a noble dream" that modern US policy decisions may have been neglecting, and he also stated that Winston Churchill considered it "the most wonderful of modern prophecies" and Harry S. Truman carried the words in his wallet.

In the popular 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy, the hero figure Julian West, awoken in the year 2000 after a long trance, remembers and reads four couplets from “For I dipt into the future…” and reflects how the world had become like the poem had envisioned, even while “in his old age, he (Tennyson) momentarily lost faith on his own prediction, as prophets in their hours of depression and doubt generally do; the words had remained eternal testimony to the seership of a poet’s heart, …” (chapter 13).

It described a revival of emotion in a jaded and spend-thrift city MP as he recalls the excitement of his youth foxhunting in Leicestershire, and foresees the end of his Victorian aristocratic society: later: "Locksley Hall" inspired many prominent 19th-century poets to parody, including Ambrose Bierce in "Weather": In a scene from the American film Marathon Man, graduate student Thomas "Babe" Levy (portrayed by actor Dustin Hoffman) attends an exclusive seminar at Columbia University.

Track two of the album Exit by electronic music ensemble Tangerine Dream is called "Pilots of Purple Twilight" in homage --- as discussed in the Wikipedia entry on the band, British poetry was an extramusical source of inspiration, particularly to band leader Edgar Froese.