After the mostly happy, lyrical years, Grieg's world had been shattered by the sudden death of his daughter from ‘inflammation of the brain’, and it was undoubtedly this tragic event that inspired the song Millom rosor (Amid Roses), which, although written in 1869, was not published until 1884, when it was included in the op. 39 group, the Romancer Ældre og Nyere (Songs Old and New). The poem by Kristofer Janson was written soon after the death of his only child. This and Vesle gut were the only settings Grieg made of Janson's verse, although a letter from the poet, dated 12 November 1900, states that he is sending Grieg a poem ‘which came to me here one night’, and which he intended as a text for a religious piece. The poem is not mentioned by title, however, and the copy of it is no longer with the letter, which itself is preserved in Bergen Public Library.

There is a restraint about both the words and the music of Millom rosor that makes the song all the more moving. The poem uses the literary convention of contrast in its two stanzas. The first is a happy picture of a young mother sitting in the garden, playing with her child, and she asks that she may always see him resting ‘amid roses’; in the second stanza, that wish is tragically granted. Grieg sets the song strophically and in a minor key, so that the sorrow is felt right from the beginning. The setting is typical of the composer's maturing style, where often something fateful and inevitable is evoked by stark simplicity. The melody makes much use of sequence and the ends of the first two phrases are echoed by the piano an octave higher than the voice, to ethereal effect, after the previous sonorous accompaniment chords. In fact, the lower register of the piano is used each time the words ‘millom rosor’ occur. The harmony is unremarkable, as if the composer did not want anything to detract from the tragic simplicity of the setting, but there is a telling use of the subdominant minor key in the second half of the strophe.