Radnóti has written eight eclogues. They are pastoral poems usually with a love theme in a classical meter, modeled on Virgil's poetry. The very un-pastoral circumstances made this one slightly different.

Before 1944, Jewish men in Hungary were taken not to concentration camps but to "munkaszolgálat" (work service) either in work camps or at the front along with the non-Jewish soldiers. They did the most dangerous jobs, like mine sweeping. That is why he writes "enlisted," not "were deported."

Radnóti was born in 1909 in an assimilated Jewish-Hungarian family. In the Fall of 1944 the prisoners of Lager Heidenau were taken on a forced march from Serbia to Germany, and he was shot dead along the way, near Gyõr.