RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AND THE PASTORAL MODE

BY

RYAN M. ROSS

DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology
in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012

Urbana, Illinois

Doctoral Committee:

Associate Professor Gayle Sherwood Magee, Chair

Associate Professor Christina Bashford
Professor William Kinderman
Professor Emeritus Nicholas Temperley
 ABSTRACT

The music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) has often been associated with a

pastoral mode of expression. While scholars have begun exploring this relationship in projects of

limited focus, an extended study has not yet been undertaken. This dissertation is the first such

study. It examines ways in which Vaughan Williams and his music have demonstrable points of

contact with the pastoral mode, emphasizing the role that literature and personal experience

played in influencing this part of his imagination. The first chapter explores the term “pastoral”

itself, its use in Western literature and music, and how all of these factors relate to Vaughan

Williams and English culture. Subsequent chapters consider a selection of the composer’s

activities, convictions, and compositions, and discuss them in light of significant pastoral

influences. Through such case studies, this dissertation demonstrates that Vaughan Williams’s

use of the pastoral mode was not only more complex and multi-layered than has previously been

understood, but it was also a major attribute of his originality and a key ingredient in his artistic

engagement with the contemporary world.

ii
For Kimberly, My Loving and Steadfast Wife

iii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Multiple people deserve recognition for helping me while I worked on this thesis. I first recognize

my wonderful parents, all four of them: Lynn & Barbara Kopitzke, and Steve & Terry Ross. Their

constant generosity, support, and encouragement have been truly overwhelming. I also specifically thank

my father, Steve Ross, for finally convincing me to stay the course during my most challenging days as a

doctoral student. My wife’s parents, Donald & Nancy Estep, also offered their encouragement and

hospitality unstintingly. Their selflessness manifested itself in many ways during the time of my research

and writing. In addition to these individuals, I here collectively recognize the support of a multitude of

other family members and friends, the complete list of whom I cannot possibly include in these

acknowledgments. You are not forgotten.

Next, I thank my doctoral advisor, Gayle Sherwood Magee. Her advice and patience have

surpassed anything I could have expected. I am extremely honored and grateful to have worked with her.

I likewise thank my other dissertation committee members: Christina Bashford, William Kinderman, and

Nicholas Temperley. While it would be impossible to recount everything I have learned from them, I can

easily recall instances in which each went out of their way to aid me in my career and development.

Multiple people in the wider scholarly community also offered valuable advice and answers to

questions. I single out Byron Adams for special thanks. His role in my selection for the 2006 Ralph

Vaughan Williams Fellowship and his deep insights into English music acted as determining factors in

my decision to study this topic. An incomplete list of other scholars (both of English music and of other

areas) who assisted me in this project at various points includes Renee Cherie Clark, Alain Frogley,

Daniel Grimley, Nathaniel Lew, Jeffrey Magee, Rebecca Mitchell, Julian Onderdonk, Eric Saylor,

Christopher Scheer, Travis Stimeling, Aidan Thomson, Justin Vickers, John Wagstaff, and Aaron Ziegel.

Finally, I thank my wife Kimberly. Her unending patience, love, support, and encouragement

throughout this project empowered me to overcome its formidable frustrations and obstacles. Of all the

people who helped me, I owe her the most.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………..….1

CHAPTER 1: SITUATING VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AND THE PASTORAL MODE………..7

CHAPTER 2: FOLKSONG, THE PASTORAL MODE, AND VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AS

“MUSICAL PHILOLOGIST,” CA. 1895-1914…………….……..………………….....30

CHAPTER 3: VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, THE PROGRESSIVE SPIRIT, AND THE

PASTORAL ODE, CA. 1895-1914…….………………..……………………………....57

CHAPTER 4: VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AND THE PASTORAL ELEGY, PART I: THE

AFTERMATH OF THE GREAT WAR……………………………………………...….90

CHAPTER 5: VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AND THE PASTORAL ELEGY, PART II: AN

OXFORD ELEGY AND THE POST-WORLD WAR II MUSIC……………………...138

CHAPTER 6: VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AND THE PASTORAL ALLEGORY: THE

PILGRIM’S PROGRESS………………………………………………………..…..…181

EPILOGUE……………………………………………………………………………………..224

APPENDIX A: A LIST OF PASTORAL-RELATED WORKS BY VAUGHAN

WILLIAMS…….………………………………………………………………..……...226

APPENDIX B: LINDEN LEA TEXTS (BARNES)………………………..………………...…229

APPENDIX C: THE NEW GHOST (FREDEGOND SHOVE, 1918)…………….….……...…231

APPENDIX D: THE WATER MILL (FREDEGOND SHOVE, 1918)………….……………...232

APPENDIX E: FLOS CAMPI EPIGRAPHS (WITH KING JAMES TRANSLATIONS

/VERSE NUMBERS)……………………………………………...…………..…….…233

APPENDIX F: VAUGHAN WILLIAMS’S ADAPTED TEXT FOR AN OXFORD ELEGY

AND THE ORIGINAL POEMS BY MATTHEW ARNOLD…................................…234

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………..….250

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS CONSULTED AND SCORES USED FOR MUSICAL

EXAMPLES……………………………………………………………………..….….254

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 Introduction

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was the first and most influential of twentieth-

century English composers associated with a pastoral orientation. His avid collecting of folksong

and interest in forging a distinctly national music have largely shaped his reputation. As Alain

Frogley states, “Mention the name of Ralph Vaughan Williams and into most people’s minds

come immediately three words: English, pastoral, and folksong.”1 Titles of his major works, In

the Fen Country (1904), The Lark Ascending (1914), and The Shepherds of the Delectable

Mountains (1921), confirm this preoccupation with rural themes.

During the rising tide of the modernist aesthetic of the mid-twentieth century, Vaughan

Williams became a target for charges of backward provincialism. Already in 1931, Aaron

Copland likened Vaughan Williams to a “gentleman farmer” whose works had small claim on

the international stage.2 Even in his own country, Vaughan Williams drew criticism for works

that were perceived to be pastorally inspired and therefore considered by some outmoded,

especially A Pastoral Symphony (1921). Hugh Allen remarked that the symphony suggested

V.W. rolling over and over in a ploughed field on a wet day,” while Peter Warlock compared it

to “a cow looking over a gate,” and Elizabeth Lutyens dismissed the work as “cowpat music.”3

Even now, Vaughan Williams is sometimes regarded, to borrow Walter Aaron Clark’s words, as

1
Alain Frogley, “Constructing Englishness in music: national character and the reception of Ralph Vaughan
Williams,” in Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1996), edited by Frogley, p. 1.
2
Aaron Copland, Copland on Music (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1960), p. 197. This statement comes from a
lengthier writing treating music in London in 1931. To be fair, Copland amended his view decades later when this
and various other writings were collected into the book cited in this note. Copland modifies his earlier view in a
footnote: “Subsequent works, especially the composer’s Symphony No. 4, give the lie to this statement.”
3
With the exception of the Lutyens quote (discussed more fully in Chapter 4), these statements may be found in
Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 155-156.
For more on this topic, see Steve Smith, “Beyond ‘cow pat’: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s complex legacy,” in The
International Herald Tribune FINANCE section (July 16, 2008), p. 10.

1
“a sort of bucolic bard, stubbornly resisting the encroachment of modernism and the eclipse of

Albion.”4

In this context, a reevaluation of Vaughan Williams’s embrace of the pastoral mode is

overdue. As recently as 2008, in his documentary film – O Thou Transcendent: The Life of Ralph

Vaughan Williams – Tony Palmer sought “to explode forever, I hope, the image of a cuddly old

Uncle, endlessly recycling English folk songs, and to awaken the audience to a central figure in

our musical heritage who did more for us than Greensleeves and Lark Ascending.”5 Palmer’s

statement seems to subscribe to the notion that Vaughan Williams’s “pastoral” side elicits too

much association with the quaint, provincial, or diminutive aspects of the composer as dictated

by those who would (and did) hastily pigeonhole him. Moreover, the Vaughan Williams Fiftieth

Anniversary Editions of two prominent classical music magazines in the United Kingdom,

Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine, devoted large articles to the composer that strove to

reassess and resituate his country bumpkin image.6 While all of these projects assume, at least in

part, the laudable position that there is more to Vaughan Williams’s music than the “pastoral”

label, they nonetheless do little to explore the concept of the pastoral mode itself as something

more than a monolithic and ultimately unflattering association.

Critical examinations of the pastoral aspects of Vaughan Williams’s music are a

relatively recent development in the secondary literature. They are few and without exception

limited in scope. Many are situated within larger studies with broader aims. For example, in their

book The English Musical Renaissance 1860-1940: Construction and Deconstruction, Robert

4
Walter Aaron Clark, “Vaughan Williams and the ‘night side of nature’: Octatonicism in Riders to the Sea,” in
Vaughan Williams Essays (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), edited by Byron Adams and Robin Wells, p. 55.
5
Tony Palmer, “O Thou Transcendent…,” Oxford University Press Magazine (2007), reprinted with permission on
the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Website: http://www.rvwsociety.com/i-frame/tonypalmer.htm.
6
See the July 2008 issues of both magazines.

2
Stradling and Meirion Hughes discuss Vaughan Williams’s folksong activities in connection

with pastoral music and as part of a national movement in the decades before and after the turn

of the twentieth century. But they do little to unpack the term “pastoral” beyond a general

association with the countryside and folksong.7 Also, as one review demonstrates, their

representation of Vaughan Williams is deeply flawed.8 Wilfrid Mellers’s 1989 book, Vaughan

Williams and the Vision of Albion, contains many unique personal insights that touch upon

pastoral themes. These, however, lack investigative rigor and often have a journalistic feel.9

Alain Frogley’s introductory chapter to his 1996 edited volume Vaughan Williams Studies,

already cited, is much more circumspect and research-grounded, though it treats the subject of

the pastoral mode mostly in terms of how it has shaped the composer’s reputation and for the

purpose of preparing the subsequent studies in his book. David Manning’s 2003 dissertation

posits a linkage between pastoral music and nationalism especially in its early pages, but once

more in an oblique way and in service of preparing the analyses mentioned in his title and that

form the bulk of the document.10 One very recent article by Eric Saylor focuses upon Vaughan

Williams’s A Pastoral Symphony, as well as other works by Elgar and Arthur Bliss, in the effort

to reevaluate the negative musical reception of the term “pastoral” by placing the music within

the context of World War I. One of the article’s primary aims is to examine the pastoral mode’s

“hard” or “Death in Arcadia” aspect as adopted by early 20th century English composers, since it

has been largely ignored or unrecognized. Saylor’s first sentence well sums up the overall lack of
7
See Stradling and Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance 1840-1940: Constructing a National Music 2nd Edition
(Manchester University Press, 2001).
8
See Alain Frogley, Review-Article – “Rewriting the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British Music Since
1840,” in Music & Letters Vol. 84, No. 2 (May 2003), pp. 241-257. Frogley discusses at length the factual errors in
this book and the misconstruing of Vaughan Williams’s character and career aims.
9
See Mellers, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989). My comments on and
quotations from this book apply strictly to the 1989 edition. I have only recently learned that a new edition
appeared in 2009, and I have yet to access it.
10
See David J. Manning, “Harmony, Tonality and Structure in Vaughan Williams’s Music,” (Ph.D. dissertation,
Cardiff University, 2003).

3
solid discourse on the subject: “There is a longstanding problem associated with English pastoral

music of the twentieth century: no one really knows how to describe it.”11

Extending and expanding upon Saylor’s work, my main goal in this dissertation is to

demonstrate that Vaughan Williams’s relationship with the pastoral mode is multifaceted and

goes beyond the pejorative images described up to this point. I also aim to illustrate how, like

writers and artists before him, Vaughan Williams connected with it in ways that not only

reference the past, but also speak directly to the social and cultural concerns of his time. In

contrast to the ultra-modernist attitude that took hold around him in his later years – that the past

was something to be written against or eschewed (at least in favor of the “new”) – Vaughan

Williams believed throughout his life that the paradigms and creations of the past are a valuable

key to understanding and engaging with the present, as well as a vital means by which to create

original art.12 This is not to say that he was against modernism in all of its manifestations. Quite

to the contrary, Vaughan Williams treasured the original and experimented in many ways, but

always with respect toward tradition. It is this aspect of his art that I believe is particularly useful

in evaluating his “pastoral” music. The pastoral mode has a profound relationship with past

conventions. If we hold to the most rigid ideals of certain early to mid-twentieth-century

modernists – those in which tradition is something to be downplayed or even mocked – we may

inevitably see the pastoral mode as something absolutely and inherently obsolete. But if we view

Vaughan Williams’s pastoral music in the wider context of his culture and in the light of his

actual, rather than merely assumed, views concerning the past and present, we stand a better

chance of learning more about how and why he relates to it.

11
Eric Saylor, “‘It’s Not Lambkins Frisking At All’: English Pastoral Music and the Great War,” in The Musical
Quarterly Vol. 91, Nos. 1-2 (2008), p. 39.
12
Vaughan Williams summarized some of his views on this subject in his short essay “Tradition,” contained within
the larger collection of essays based upon lectures entitled “National Music.” See Vaughan Williams, National
Music and Other Essays 2nd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 59-61.

4
 A systematic examination of Vaughan Williams and the pastoral mode does not exist, and

this writing is not an attempt at one. Rather, I will offer in the following chapters a roughly

chronological series of case studies that discuss particular periods, musical activities, and

compositions. In Chapter 1, I establish a framework for discussing the term “pastoral,” its major

conventions, and its relationship to the composer’s background and musical pursuits. I argue that

his primary means of contact with the mode are experiential and literary in nature. I move on in

Chapter 2 to Vaughan Williams’s relationship with English folk music and how it relates to the

pastoral mode. Building upon the work of Julian Onderdonk, Roger Savage, and others, I further

explore this relationship in light of Vaughan Williams’s cultural and literary interests, with a

central focus upon his favorite novel, Lavengro, during the period in which he first discovered

and collected folk songs.13 In Chapter 3 I discuss pastoral art and literature within the context of

late Victorian and Edwardian culture before relating such trends to the poetry Vaughan Williams

set and the interests and socio-political views he espoused before World War I (henceforth

referred to as “the Great War”). During this period, his use of pastoral texts and subjects reflects

a predominantly positive outlook, celebrating the beauty of his natural surroundings and exuding

optimism at what the future might hold. With Chapter 4 I enter darker terrain and discuss

Vaughan Williams’s clearest engagement with the so-called “hard pastoral” in his music

following the Great War. In many of these pastoral works, he uses rural texts and images as a

backdrop to death, mourning, and related themes. In Chapter 5 I continue my examination of

Vaughan Williams and the pastoral elegy by considering the late (post-World War II)

compositions. Placing An Oxford Elegy (completed 1949) at the center of my discussion, I

analyze this and other works in light of the pastoral elegy that mourns not, or not only, the death

13
Throughout this dissertation I will use the term “folksong” to refer to a genre, style, or manner. I will use the
words “folk song” to refer to particular examples.

5
of loved ones, but also the passing of an age. In this period of Vaughan Williams’s career,

themes of youthful innocence both contrast and intermingle with adult realities and postwar

pessimism. The final chapter considers a single work, the The Pilgrim’s Progress, as Vaughan

Williams’s life and career distilled into a dramatic morality tale. Given the presence of both soft

and hard pastoral themes in his adaptation of John Bunyan’s work, I compare the opera to the

pastoral subgenre of the moral allegory. I find further justification for seeing this composition in

such a way by citing Vaughan Williams’s references in his written essays to Bunyan’s literary

masterpiece. One will notice that the pastoral works I choose for my subjects and analyses hinge

largely on Vaughan Williams’s points of contact with literary genres. I will explain reasons for

concentrating on these in Chapter 1.

As researchers continue to assess the place of Vaughan Williams in twentieth-century

music, they will face the challenge of confronting his pastoral forays and what they mean in the

wider context of his time and place. As we learn more about Vaughan Williams and his music, it

becomes clearer that we can no longer afford to accept lazy or pejorative or assumptions about

his relationship with the pastoral mode. It is in this spirit that I offer the present study.

6
 Chapter 1

Situating Vaughan Williams and the Pastoral Mode

The primary difficulty in using the term “pastoral” is establishing satisfactory definitions

for it. Western pastoral traditions alone span more than two millennia and numerous cultures.

Further differences and layers of complexity result from diverse repositories of pastoralism,

among which are literature, visual art, and music. Quite simply, the term “pastoral” has been

understood differently according to different times, places, and contexts. It is thus unsurprising

that published writings have for long reflected the diversity that has built up around it. To quote a

well-known article by Paul Alpers, in addressing the term’s definitions, “we find nothing like a

coherent account of either its nature or its history…It sometimes seems as if there are as many

versions of pastoral as there are critics who write about it.”14 Perhaps the most famous, and

certainly one of the most quoted, attempts at a definition comes from William Empson in his

seminal Some Versions of the Pastoral: – “putting the complex into the simple.”15 While this

definition is not especially useful as applied to particular cases, it is striking both how open it is

and how it has elicited acknowledgment in nearly every significant text on the subject. Empson’s

definition illustrates the broad language needed for sufficient coverage. For these reasons,

“pastoral” is often referred to by Alpers (in the article already cited) and others as a mode of

expression rather than a cohesive style or genre.

Inevitably, the present study follows others in seeking a useful definition of the term

“pastoral.” The first step is to establish some common denominator of understanding concerning

what the term means in the most general sense and what signifiers are most often responsible for

communicating an understood “pastoral” character. According to most dictionaries, the word

14
Paul Alpers, “What is Pastoral?” in Critical Inquiry Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring, 1982), p. 437.
15
William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1950, 1968), p. 22.

7
“pastoral” carries four primary meanings: – something relating to shepherds, an idyllic rural

setting, a work of art or literature involving shepherds or rural scenery, or relating to the

leadership of a Protestant church congregation. The pastoral mode’s relationship with shepherds

and the shepherds’ life is salient. Indeed, the word itself derives from the Latin “pastoralis,”

which means “relating to a shepherd.” Its sister term “bucolic” comes from the Greek word

“boukolos,” meaning “herdsman.” Literary scholars often use the terms synonymously.16

Western manifestations of the pastoral mode show that shepherds and the shepherds’ life lie at

the heart of the term’s associations in art and literature, particularly in ancient Greek and Roman

poetry.17 Still, wider understanding of the pastoral mode is also bound up with the idealized

aspects of country life which may or may not include the shepherd theme that is at the roots of

the terms “pastoral” or “bucolic.” In this latter vein, writers and artists particularly of Greek and

Roman antiquity use the countryside as a setting within which to muse on the pleasant aspects of

rural life or enact narratives of merriment and leisure. These two broad areas of the pastoral

mode – that concerning the life of shepherds and that concerned with an idealized countryside of

various sorts – are by no means mutually exclusive.18

16
J.E. Congleton points out that, with some exceptions, in the English Renaissance the literary terms “idyll,”
“Eclogue,” “bucolic,” and “pastoral” were often used synonymously. See Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in
England 1684-1798 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1952), pp. 6 ff. This interchangeability often persists in
late twentieth-century scholarship on pastoral literature. In his edited volume, The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook,
Bryan Loughrey defines the term “bucolic”: “Now almost a synonym for pastoral, but with a slightly humorous
overtone.” (pg, 25). For an example of synonymous use of the terms in practice, see J.D. Reed, “Idyll 6 and the
Development of Bucolic after Theocritus,” in James J. Clauss and Martine Cuypers, eds., A Companion to Hellenistic
Literature (Chichester and Oxford: Wiley and Sons, 2010), pp. 238-241.
17
For more information on the pastoral mode’s close relationship with the shepherd theme, see Paul Alpers, What
Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chapter 4; Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Mediaeval into
Renaissance (Ipswich, UK: D.S. Brewer Ltd.; Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1977); and Renato Poggioli, The
Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), chapters
1 and 5.
18
For more on this, see Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal and Terry
Gifford, Pastoral The New Critical Idiom Series (London: Routledge, 1999), edited by John Drukakis, chapter 3.

8
 The basic pastoral patterns of shepherds’ lives and an idealized rural world lead one to

consider another duality present in ancient literature and particularly noticeable more recently –

that of the so-called “soft” as opposed to the “hard” pastoral.19 The “soft” pastoral denotes an

ideal setting in which its inhabitants live seemingly untroubled lives surrounded by natural

paradise. It is analogous to Arcadia. In the Greek classical tradition, Arcadia was an actual region

in southwest Greece celebrated on account of its desolate natural beauty and seclusion. It became

the imagined home of the shepherd god Pan. On the authority of Virgil’s Eclogues, Arcadia

came to stand for a past “Golden Age” paradise in the hands of Renaissance writers and painters

who looked back to antiquity for Utopian models. In Arcadia, gods, shepherds, animals, and

other beings lived in harmony with one another and with nature, leading pleasant lives largely

free of human vices that were common elsewhere. In large part because of this and other

enduring versions of soft pastoral, the mode as a whole is often associated with nostalgia and the

past.

The “hard” pastoral, on the other hand, typically denotes one of two primary forms of

strife occurring in a rural setting. It may feature the rural world as the setting of death and other

tragedy, often at odds with the beauty of the natural surroundings. It may also center on the

portrayal of the hardness of life for rural workers. In this scenario, shepherds and other rural

workers are hardly the happy, carefree figures that soft pastorals portray. Instead, they lead

difficult lives in servitude to rich masters who idealize their lot; they scrape by on meager wages

19
The terms “soft pastoral” and “hard pastoral” regularly appear in recent secondary literature on the topic. I can
date their usage in the scholarly literature at least as early as a 1972 article by Paul Alpers – “The Eclogue Tradition
and the Nature of Pastoral,” in College English Vol. 34, No. 3 (Dec, 1972), pp. 352-371. An important study on the
pastoral from the next decade uses the terms synonymously in the course of discussing, among other subjects, the
poetry of William Wordsworth. See Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 45, 278-281. A source even more closely related to the topic of
Vaughan Williams – Eric Saylor’s already-cited article on A Pastoral Symphony – upholds the terms and their
meanings. (See Saylor, “It’s Not Lambkins Frisking At All.”)

9
without much hope of anything but a burdensome existence. In some cases the natural

environment, despite its beautiful appearance, may actually contribute to material hardships for

its underclass. Such a version of “hard pastoral” tinges Virgil’s Georgics. This work chronicles,

among other things, the arduous tasks of farmers. Although present in all periods of literature,

the hard pastoral arguably gained more traction in the periods after antiquity, when writers and

painters more often opted for what they considered to be edgier or more realistic themes. An

example of hard pastoral would be Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), which

recounts how an innocent woman succumbs to terrible circumstances in the author’s fictional

English county of Wessex.

Mention of the Georgic brings to the forefront another important relationship in pastoral

art is that between urban and rural worlds and their inhabitants. Peter Marinelli writes: “The

contrast between town and country is…essential to the rise of a distinctively pastoral art.”20

Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, an important twentieth-century study of pastoral

literature, treats this theme. It views the oppressed lower class in the rural world versus the upper

class that leisurely idealizes that world and its people as an underlying tension throughout the

history of the pastoral mode. Williams argues that the city and country are actually related

through the dynamic of class perspective.21 Indeed, other writers together with him emphasize

the point that pastoral art and literature was long produced for and by a wealthy urban audience.

According to them, creations in the pastoral mode often reflect the preconceptions of those

whose personal stake betrays privileged status, and whose priorities often involve decidedly

urban perspectives. W.J. Keith, for example, differentiates between the words “rural” and

“pastoral” in that the former term is a much more neutral adjective for things non-urban and that

20
Peter V. Marinelli, Pastoral, The Critical Idiom Series (London: Methuen & Co., 1971), edited by John D. Jump, p.
12.
21
See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

10
the latter tradition came to signify a rural “retreat from care” only according to urban

sensibilities.22

In addition to, or perhaps in spite of, these broader trends, the pastoral mode carries

another common characteristic that brings us back to a pattern mentioned at the beginning of this

chapter. Its particular manifestations from one case to another rely to a great extent on the

perspective of whoever happens to be creating the world or narrative. As Annabel Patterson has

argued, arriving at a precise definition for “pastoral” is thus ultimately impossible and less

important than the manners in which different people have used it to express their own ideas and

intentions.23 It is a peculiarly supple mode, requiring few elements to be recognizable as such

and yet yielding widely varying results that frustrate the establishment of satisfactory boundaries

for it.

The complexities increase when we consider music. Music deemed “pastoral” developed

according to varied traditions throughout Western Europe up through the Baroque Period and

after.24 The gestures that became widely associated with the musical pastoral manner in Common

Practice period compositions, and analyzed as such by Robert Hatten and others, gained reliable

consistency only in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and were initially largely associated with

Italian operas based upon stories from antiquity. 25 Though such gestures varied from one period

to the next, and from one work to another, a representative vocabulary may be rehearsed here:

triple or compound meters with lilting rhythms, static chords or pedal points in the bass that may
22
W. J. Keith, The Rural Tradition: A Study of the Non-Fiction Prose Writers of the English Countryside (University of
Toronto Press, 1974), p. 4. Owen Schur likewise differentiates between mere nature poetry and “pastoral” poetry.
In his view, “the artifice of situation and setting” serve to characterize pastoral poetry as opposed to ordinary
experience of nature. See Owen Schur, Victorian Pastoral (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), p. 9.
23
Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry, p. 7.
24
For a fuller explanation of several such trends, see Geoffrey Chew and Owen Jander, “Pastoral,” in Grove Music
Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40091 (accessed
March 23, 2011).
25
See Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 53-67.

11
signal drone-like effects, simple harmonic progressions that often favor major keys and

modulations to the subdominant, the use of reed instruments for melodic lines or the imitation of

such instruments where none are actually present, etc. Such features became the accepted means

of signifying pastoral topics up until roughly the twentieth century, when the pool widened and

more composer-unique signifiers and styles took root (i.e. Debussy’s versus Ravel’s musical

pastoral styles that incorporate various pentatonic or modal mixtures, which may be seen in such

works as Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and Daphnis et Chloé).26

We now move to the particular case of Ralph Vaughan Williams and his musical

engagement with the pastoral mode. The dynamic here, as always, is between broader pastoral

definitions and a person’s particular background and interests. In considering Vaughan

Williams’s “pastoral” music, I will show that while he musically set texts and themes that reflect

many of the mode’s social patterns (discussed above) to varying degrees, he did so in a highly

individual, and often ambivalent, manner. Before examining Vaughan Williams’s pastoral music,

it is useful to recount certain themes and circumstances in his life and career. Some of these are

of a personal nature, while others speak to outside circumstances that inevitably affected his

activities and outlook.

Vaughan Williams was born into a family of means. His father, an ordained member of

the clergy, came from a background of lawyers. His mother was a member of the Wedgwood

family of ceramics fame and a niece of Charles Darwin. Neither during his youth, nor indeed

during much of his adult life did Ralph experience material want, with the possible and unique

exception of his service in the Great War. His life was one that was largely secure in privilege,

allowing him to pursue his interests without fear of destitution. He developed some primary

26
A useful source that outlines pastoral trends in music from the Baroque period up to the twentieth century is
Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2006), pp. 207-271.

12
interests while still young that, together with this background of plenty, go a long way toward

determining the nature of his engagement with the pastoral mode.

The first of these interests was landscape. Upon the death of his father in 1875, the young

Ralph moved from Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, where he was born, to the Wedgwood

country house in the North Downs of Surrey - Leith Hill Place. Here, with the exception of

lengthy trips and vacations, he spent much of the remainder of his juvenile years. The grounds of

the home itself had (and have) considerable natural beauty, with ample and well-tended gardens.

Such surroundings quickly excited the imagination of a boy as impressionable as Ralph. Ursula

Vaughan Williams’s biography of her husband contains many second-hand accounts of these

scenes and related events, as well as many others throughout the rest of Vaughan Williams’s life.

It contains many interesting points and insights but should be used with caution. She opens the

book with several anecdotes that lend support to her future husband’s early enthusiasm for

natural scenery, even while he was still living in Down Ampney as a toddler.27 “Take me there,”

said the young boy, when he saw a darkened lane in the gardens at his first home.28 His first

attempt at a musical composition, the four-measure “The Robin’s Nest,” suggests that as early as

age six he was responding musically to pastoral-related stimuli. Nor, according to both himself

and Ursula, did he cease immersing himself in nature. In early adolescence he established his

lifelong habit of long walks and extended bicycle trips into the countryside. On at least one

occasion, he took a greater pleasure in rural surroundings than did his peers. While attending

school at Rottingdean, he wrote home from Brighton: “Most of the boys thought the country

27
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 8-
38. These anecdotes are often of unclear origin, presumably coming to us second-hand from Vaughan Williams
himself.
28
Ibid, p. 8.

13
round was dull. I thought it lovely and enjoyed our walks.”29 When in 1887 he entered

Charterhouse School in Godalming, one of England’s oldest boarding schools and surrounded by

lush rural scenery, he continued his walks and expeditions.30 When he interrupted his study at

the Royal College of Music in London and pursued a history degree at Cambridge University

from 1892 to 1894, he explored the surrounding countryside on a bicycle.31 Such trips inspired

him musically for the rest of his life, but there is evidence that this was the case even during his

Cambridge years. Although he wrote “Miserable failure, not to be taken seriously” on its

manuscript, the Reminiscences of a Walk at Frankham for piano of 1894 (with separate titles

indicating the various parts of the excursion) indicates that, quite early in his adult career,

Vaughan Williams freely allowed his outdoor sojourns to influence his musical endeavors.32

In a letter to his cousin, Ralph Wedgwood, Vaughan Williams summarizes his love for,

to use his chosen adjective, “soft” pastoral beauty.

Don’t think me degenerate in my likes but you know I have

always preferred soft scenery to stern uncomfortable
scenery…My heart goes through the same manoeuvres as
Wordsworths [sic] when he saw a rainbow when I see a
long low range of hills – I suppose this comes from being
born in Surrey S.W.33

A key highlight here is the reference to Wordsworth. Quoting him in this context, Vaughan

Williams signals a second crucial element in his own background that is indispensable to any

29
Ibid, p. 24.
30
Ibid, p. 26.
31
Ibid, p. 37-38.
32
The titles of the pieces are: “A steamy afternoon (andantino languid),” “Little River Hall,” “Anxiety on the Way
Home,” “Grinham’s cottage appears in sight,” and “Evening comes on.” See Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of
Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 4.
33
Ralph Vaughan Williams, letter to Ralph Wedgwood dated some time in 1898, quoted in Letters of Ralph
Vaughan Williams 1895-1958 (Oxford University Press, 2008), edited by Hugh Cobbe, p. 31. Both Cobbe and
Michael Kennedy note the error in this letter concerning Vaughan Williams’s birthplace. On the following page
Cobbe suggests that this was an intentional error given that Vaughan Williams knew he was born in Down Ampney,
Gloucestershire, but he offers no explanation as to why the composer would have done this. See also Kennedy,
The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 396. Another letter to Ralph Wedgwood dated 1902 affirms a similar love
for pastoral landscape. See Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, p. 41.

14
discussion of his pastoral leanings: the deep knowledge and love of literature he harbored

throughout his life. In an article devoted entirely to Vaughan Williams’s literary tastes and

influences, Ursula Vaughan Williams claims that, from an early age, Ralph’s literary habits were

in keeping with the Victorian tradition of middle and upper class families reading voraciously for

both educational and recreational purposes. She gives us second-hand testimony that Leith Hill

Place “was a household where there was plenty of time for everything, and one where all of them

were expected to take their pleasures seriously. Reading aloud was a normal part of these

pleasures, and the grown-ups devoted hours to the children’s education.” Ursula continues,

describing how for Vaughan Williams “poetry [was] as normal an experience as prose,”

remarking not long after that she is “sure that the actual sound of words was a foundation well

and truly laid in the composer’s earliest years.”34 While still young, Vaughan Williams gained an

impressive fluency in English literature, having read among many other things large helpings of

Shakespeare, Dickens, and the Romantic poets. From this latter group, and particularly

Wordsworth, Vaughan Williams could find plenty to further stoke his enthusiasm for pastoral

beauty. He was also familiar with a great deal of literature directly involving the pastoral mode.

A short list includes Virgil, the King James Bible, Spenser, and Bunyan.

Vaughan Williams’s involvement with literature transcended that of a mere connoisseur

and formed a central concern in his musical art. A large portion of his compositional output –

both texted and un-texted works – takes words from, or is programmatically inspired by, literary

sources. Addressing the centrality of literature to the music of Vaughan Williams, Michael

Kennedy writes: “literature was the spark which set his imagination alight so that he could

34
Ursula Vaughan Williams, “Ralph Vaughan Williams and His Choice of Words for Music,” in Proceedings of the
Royal Music Association Vol. 99 (1972-1973), p. 81.

15
transform literary inspiration into his own musical language.”35 Kennedy proceeds to point out

the caveat that although Vaughan Williams was inspired by literature, he often set texts in ways

that do not always follow their sequential placement, or even meanings. In the chapters that

follow I will frequently point out such instances. This practice has profound implications for his

pastoral settings.36

With his background of privilege, Vaughan Williams seems at first sight to conform for

the most part to the template of upper-class pastoralist, with the exception of owning or claiming

some sort of urban perspective. A closer examination does much to modify this picture. Ursula

Vaughan Williams, in a letter to Lionel Pike, provided a crucial piece of insight:

I do think that it is a mistake to think of Ralph as a

countryman – he wasn’t. Certainly born in Gloucestershire
– but who can choose where they’re born? Brought up in
his grandparents’ house at Leith Hill – but he escaped to
London as soon as he could, and lived there till [his first
wife] Adeline’s ill health made their tall Cheyne Walk
home impossible. He was enchanted to return to London in
1953. He said that his London Symphony should be called
‘Symphony by a Londoner’. He certainly loved some
country places, and walking, but he had no other country
pastimes. (War-time vegetable growing doesn’t really
count, I think.) And, if you look at his hands you will see
that they are not at all country hands – I think that this is
very important to remember. Of course folk songs are
(were?) much found in country places, but he collected
them because they were about to be lost, with the literacy
following the education act, not because they came from
the country.37

35
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 117.
36
Byron Adams has discussed this aspect of Vaughan Williams’s compositional process as it pertains to the latter’s
setting of Biblical texts. See Adams, “Scripture, Church, and culture: biblical texts in the works of Ralph Vaughan
Williams,” in Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies, pp. 99-117.
37
Excerpt of a letter from Ursula Vaughan Williams to Lionel Pike, quoted in Pike, Vaughan Williams and the
Symphony, Symphonic Studies No. 2 (London: Toccata Press, 2003), p. 7, n. 1. I should note here that I do not
entirely agree with Ursula’s statement about Vaughan Williams collecting folk songs from the country only because
that is where he found them. As I argue in the next chapter, I believe Vaughan Williams’s fascination with folksong
as being part of the countryside ran deeper.

16
Such remarks offered by the one closest to Vaughan Williams (at least during the latter part of

his life) suggest much about how the composer’s background relates to pastoral conventions. If

she can be believed, her testimony places him squarely in the role of a privileged artist who

spends considerable time in rural regions but whose lifestyle is decidedly urban in outlook. As

much as he enjoyed his forays into rural England, and as much as they together with folksong

demonstrably influenced his music, Vaughan Williams was not a member of the rural working

community. Neither did he depend financially upon the grueling tasks of farming or other

country occupations. His time there was largely characterized by leisurely activity. With the

exception of voluntary military service in France Vaughan Williams was never compelled to

experience the countryside in physically strenuous ways.

Not only did Vaughan Williams lack a rural working class background, but in multiple

aspects his conception of the countryside was decidedly idealized. First, much of the pastoral

literature that he consumed was itself the product of a leisured class. As literature was a deciding

factor influencing his pastoral music, it is significant that much of what he read, and chose to set,

largely complemented this outlook. Second, he believed that English folksong was hidden

knowledge to be discovered in the hands of unlettered rural people. For him, this knowledge and

repertoire formed part of the mystique of the countryside. (I discuss this in Chapter 2.) And yet,

if he idealized folksong and other things he associated with the countryside, all indications are

that he did not trivialize the lot of real rural-dwelling people. He was under no illusions about the

fact that they lived physically harder lives than he did, and he strove to respect their dignity when

he journeyed out to collect folk songs.38 Much of this may stem from his upbringing. According

to J. Ellis Cook, the son of a workman at Leith Hill Place during Vaughan Williams’s youth, the

38
For more information on Vaughan Williams and his attitudes toward folksingers, see Julian Onderdonk, “Ralph
Vaughan Williams’s Folksong Collecting: English Nationalism and the Rise of Professional Society,” (Ph.D.
dissertation, City University of New York, 1998), chapter 6 ff.

17
Vaughan Williams children (Ralph along with his older brother, Hervey, and his younger sister,

Margaret) were from a young age taught by their mother to respect the servants and were

punished for “telling tales.”39

Williams’s musical approach to the pastoral mode is characterized by ambivalence. Only

seldom in his output does one find obvious or unmediated appropriation of musical pastoral

topics as they were used in the 18th century and afterward. The difficulty lies in discerning when

he is referencing pastoral topics and when he is imitating or invoking English folksong. Often it

is unclear when he is attempting either, or if and when the two are mutually exclusive. Perhaps

sensing this very issue, Raymond Monelle recently suggested that it is difficult to discuss

Vaughan Williams’s music in pastoral terms because they are so deeply intertwined.40 Since

Vaughan Williams hardly ever mentioned musical pastoral topics in his writings, it is also

difficult to say to what extent he separated them from the particular folk songs he heard. The best

way of approaching this question is by analyzing what he did as a composer rather than what he

said (or did not say) as an essayist. Though relatively rare, his references to the word “pastoral”

in the titles and tempo indications of his works provide some insights. As a first example, let us

briefly consider A Pastoral Symphony (completed 1921). Though the work was named “pastoral”

by the composer, it is challenging to find in it any sustained or forthright use of musical pastoral

topics. Much of the symphony belies the kind of simplicity of melody, texture, and mood

typically associated with them. Its harmony is sophisticated, its melodic framework highly

dependent on overlapping themes and figures, and its rhythms structurally complex.41 Perhaps

39
Quoted in The R.C.M. Magazine, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Easter Term, 1959), pp. 24-25. Cook also relates that the child
Vaughan Williams used to ask workers around Leith Hill Place, including Cook’s grandfather, for songs that he
would then write down.
40
Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral, pp. 270-271.
41
See Lionel Pike, “Rhythm in the Symphonies,” in Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies, p. 185. Pike’s essay on
rhythm in Vaughan Williams’s symphonies demonstrates the composer’s unique approach to this musical element.

18
the most tenable target for such discussion is the third movement. Notwithstanding the fact that a

scherzo movement is usually the most rhythmically consistent point in any symphony, let alone

one called “pastoral,” one sees here a section that on the surface seems to come closest to

musical pastoral topics but that on closer inspection complicates such comparisons. First, it is

true that after awhile the listener encounters what sounds much like a rustic dance, homophonic

and in triple time. The example below shows the second, more fully scored, statement of this

theme.

Ex. 1.1: Vaughan Williams, A Pastoral Symphony, Mov. III (mm. 134-143)

One statement is particularly noteworthy and may be usefully applied to the third movement of A Pastoral
Symphony: “Furthermore, it is time to jettison the idea that triplets represent a facile kind of folksiness in Vaughan
Williams: an appreciation of his use of conflict between rhythmic manifestations of the prime numbers two and
three is a fact basic to understanding the Fifth and Sixth symphonies.”

19
But the listener arrives at this point only after first encountering subtle passages of hemiola and

textural layering. There’s also a feeling of heaviness, or “clod-hopping” as Lionel Pike terms it.42

Hugh Ottaway discerns a “mock-serious” quality to the tune in Example 1.1.43 The listener also

comes upon a recurring figure in this movement featuring solo flute and oboe over a static

accompaniment dominated by harp and strings first encountered in measures 26-40. Upon first

impression, this seems to denote both an idyllic atmosphere and the musical pastoral topic of

high woodwinds over a drone. Yet every time the material appears it proves to be fleeting, as

more instrumental layers and contrapuntal lines soon intrude.44 A similarly scored and textured

passage occurs in the final movement (the fourth), where, after a the wordless vocal line

introduced by the solo soprano, and the subsequent initial statement of the mournful main theme

in the orchestra, the flute takes up a secondary theme just finished by the cello. Both renditions

of the theme appear alongside the accompaniment of the harp. Example 1.2 shows the flute’s

statement just prior to Rehearsal J.

42
Pike, Vaughan Williams and the Symphony, p. 95.
43
Hugh Ottaway, Vaughan Williams Symphonies BBC Music Guides (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973),
p. 27.
44
In his program note for this symphony, Vaughan Williams simply refers to the third movement as “a slow dance”
and the middle section as a “trio.” See Vaughan Williams on Music (Oxford University Press, 2008), edited by David
Manning, pp. 343-344.

20
Ex. 1.2: Vaughan Williams, A Pastoral Symphony, Mov. IV (from two measures prior through

four measures after Rehearsal J)

Here again, however, this suggestively musical pastoral area is short-lived, as later on the entire

orchestra resumes a many-layered texture culminating in a climactic statement of the main

theme.

These examples are a testament to the entire symphony integrating different aesthetic

strands to a degree that qualifies the strictly topical associations of its title. When one adds to

these considerations the wartime implications that Vaughan Williams harbored for this work

(discussed in Chapter 4), the distance between soft pastoral “lambkins frisking” (as he termed it)

21
and what actually inspired the music deepen the problematic relationship between traditional

musical pastoral topics and Vaughan Williams’s practice in relation to them. No less is it unusual

that a work containing the title “pastoral” happens to be one of its composer’s most original

creations, particularly harmonically, rather than a mere exercise in musical scene painting or

escapism. Finally, the work quotes no discernable folk song. Although Hugh Ottaway claims that

the first movement’s themes are related to folksong (without being specific), Kennedy argues

against attaching any folksong idiom to the symphony.45 Even if an actual folk song were to be

found quoted in the music, this alone would not guarantee the work’s “pastoral” credentials. I

will return to this last matter shortly.

By comparison the Concerto for Oboe and Strings in A Minor (1944) may offer the

clearest example of a composition by Vaughan Williams that recalls musical pastoral topics as

something distinct, if not wholly separate, from English folksong. In this music Vaughan

Williams seemingly acknowledges the association of the oboe with the shepherd’s pipe or some

accordingly rustic instrument. The first movement’s heading makes the connection explicit –

“Rondo Pastorale” (see Example 1.3). With the main theme in the first movement built around a

Dorian pentachord and some simple repeating pitch patterns, not to mention a subdued

accompaniment, Vaughan Williams appears to be purposefully referencing musical pastoral

topics.

45
See Ottaway, Vaughan Williams Symphonies, p. 26; and Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 169.

22
Ex. 1.3: Vaughan Williams, Concerto for Oboe and Strings, Mov. I (mm. 1-4)

The heading of the short second movement reinforces the musical pastoral character –

“Minuet and Musette.” The musette’s association with rustic scenes is well-established, as it is a

dance featuring a melodic line containing stepwise motions (not infrequently played by a high

reed or flute instrument) above a drone bass such as the bagpipe.46 The minuet, on the other

hand, has long held the distinction of being a refined dance associated with aristocratic courtly

life. In the second movement of his Oboe Concerto, Vaughan Williams frames his two dances in

a ternary structure, with the minuet stated first, followed by the musette, and concluding with a

return to the minuet in which elements of the musette appear in the primed accompaniment.

Shown below are beginnings of the minuet and musette.

46
Grove’s article on “Musette” is a good starting place for more information on the dance form. See Robert A.
Green, et al. "Musette," in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/19398 (accessed December 8, 2011).

23
Ex. 1.4: Vaughan Williams, Concerto for Oboe and Strings, Mov. II: Beginning of Minuet (mm.

1-7)

Ex. 1.5: Vaughan Williams, Concerto for Oboe and Strings, Mov. II: Beginning of Musette

(Rehearsal E and following)

This movement presents yet another scenario where pinpointing what is pastoral and what is not

presents difficulties. In most estimates, a minuet does not bring to mind pastoral dance, but rather
24
urban or upper-class refinement. Yet here the minuet’s instrumental and musical character seems

at times inextricably close to that of the “pastoral” musette, as is further evidenced during the

return of the minuet wherein some of the musette’s gestures are also present. One is forced to

draw the conclusion that Vaughan Williams adapted these dance forms in personal ways that do

not always conform to long-standing conventions. Even if one claims that the second movement

as a whole is of a generalized “pastoral mood” (above and beyond the question of how it relates

to its dances’ traditional connotations), the sudden contrasts and virtuosic writing contained in

the final movement complicate considering the whole work as one-dimensionally imitating

musical pastoral topics or imparting a uniformly pastoral character. There is simply too much

variety and individuality here, even in this large scale composition that would seem to concede

most to such models.

Another problem presents itself when one conflates a so-called “folksong” idiom with

“pastoral” in works that have no corresponding programmatic titles, texts, or other associations.

(One may think, perhaps, of the First String Quartet, completed in 1908.) Although Vaughan

Williams to a large extent equated the countryside with where to find folk songs in the early

twentieth century, he was inconsistent in his collecting methods and at times acknowledged that

certain “country tunes” (a term he used to refer to “folk songs” in the first years of the twentieth

century) had shown signs of urban-rural exchange.47 Second, while it is true that the formation of

Vaughan Williams’s musical style was in some measure ultimately pastorally-inspired because

of its link to folksong in his mind, we encounter difficulties if we go further and state that a given

composition is “pastoral” simply because it may quote a particular folk song or appear to contain

47
Julian Onderdonk discusses this issue at length in “Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Folksong Collecting: English
Nationalism and the Rise of Professional Society,” chapters 3-5.

25
mannerisms of folksong.48 In some cases this may work – one thinks of the folk songs quoted in

the obviously pastoral opera Hugh the Drover (composed 1910-1914, revised multiple times

after). But in other situations the connection is murky or problematic. Take, for instance, A

London Symphony, the composer’s second essay in the genre (completed 1913, revised 1918 and

1933). In a work that programmatically references England’s largest metropolis, the music, as

Lionel Pike and Alain Frogley have in different fashions pointed out, incorporates the modal

character and melodic fingerprints of folksong.49 This is proof that, as Anthony Payne suggests,

for Vaughan Williams folksong-derived modality went far beyond simply being synonymous

with “pastoral.”50 Julian Onderdonk also cautions that Vaughan Williams’s relationship with the

modality of folksong (and folksong itself) was never monolithic or even consistent.51 Likewise,

pinpointing other musical elements in Vaughan Williams’s idiom, tying them to folksong, and

calling each “pastoral” regardless of context seems to be a hopelessly flawed enterprise.

These complex issues illustrate the dangers present when we extend assumptions about

what is musically pastoral, and what Vaughan Williams considered to be musically pastoral,

indefinitely. A far more reliable method of assessing Vaughan Williams’s pastoral music is to

begin by examining the many works that offer definite programmatic connections in set texts,

epigraphs, and titles. By letting Vaughan Williams’s signifiers guide our labeling of certain

48
For more on the assimilation of folksong into Vaughan Williams’s musical style, see Anthony Payne, “Vaughan
Williams and folk-song: The relation between folk-song and other elements in his comprehensive style,” in The
Music Review No. 15 (1954), pp. 103-126, and Payne, “Encompassing His Century’s Dilemmas: The Modality of
Vaughan Williams,” in Vaughan Williams in Perspective: Studies of an English Composer (England: Albion Press,
1998), edited by Lewis Foreman, pp. 164-175. A recent dissertation by Ian Bates proposes a theory of modality for
Vaughan Williams’s music and discusses folksong in connection with it. See Bates, “Generalized Diatonic Modality
and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Compositional Practice,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2008).
49
See Pike, Vaughan Williams and the Symphony, p. 48 ff. I also draw from a paper presented by Frogley at the
American Musicological Society 2006 Meeting in Los Angeles and elsewhere, entitled “Dancing in the ‘City of
Dreadful Night’: Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg in the 1914 Scherzo-Nocturne of Vaughan Williams’s A London
Symphony.” I thank him for sharing this scholarship with me. I discuss both A London Symphony and Frogley’s work
further in Chapters 3 and 5.
50
Payne, “Encompassing His Century’s Dilemmas,” pg. 173.
51
See Onderdonk, “Vaughan Williams and the Modes,” in Folk Music Journal Vol. 7, No. 5 (1999), pp. 609-626.

26
musical characteristics as “pastoral,” rather than merely singling out what are often at best vague

or isolated references to musical pastoral topics or “folksong idiom” where nothing else is

present, one gains the advantage of contextualizing what one hears.

I allow that sublimated pastoral influences and gestures (whether Western musical topics

or English folksong elements) exist in “non-signifier” works in Vaughan Williams’s output, but

identifying them often requires a degree of arbitrariness too great for confident assertion.

However, there is a middle category that deserves mention: compositions that are related to the

pastoral mode through some degree of separation and that depend upon inter-textual connections

not readily apparent in any immediate programmatic sense. Scores such as the Fantasia on a

Theme by Thomas Tallis and the Fifth Symphony belong to this category. The Fantasia’s

relationship with Elizabethan culture and Englishness link it in a roundabout way to pastoralism

because of the latter’s strong association with the former. (I discuss this in Chapter 3.) Likewise,

though the Fifth Symphony may not contain any forthright pastoral signifiers, its definite link to

Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (much of which relates strongly to the pastoral

mode by any recognized standard) makes it a more ready candidate for the label than a work

with no signifiers, direct or indirect. Yet here again the boundaries between what is and is not

pastoral are extremely fluid, and it is not always clear to what extent or through which degree of

separation one may reasonably apply the “indirect pastoral” label in a given case.

There is a final issue requiring a certain kind of arbitration when considering even

Vaughan Williams’s direct texts and signifiers– by what criteria are we to label them “pastoral”?

The multiple works invoking shepherds and detailed rural scene descriptions present obvious

correlations, but often the lines between “natural,” “rural,” and “pastoral” are amorphous. Is all

natural scenery rural scenery? Are all natural signifiers strictly rural? Flowers, for example, have

27
been important pastoral signifiers in literature and painting. But flowers obviously also grow in

the city. Without some pattern of other contributing elements, their relationship with

associatively pastoral imagery may be doubtful. Once more, context is crucial in labeling texts

and signifiers as “pastoral.” The simple truth is that often an observer is compelled to make

subjective and personal judgments concerning when to apply the label. With these issues in

mind, I have created a list of those Vaughan Williams compositions the texts and signifiers of

which I deem to be directly pastoral (i.e. invoking shepherds or what I consider to be some

obvious rural scenic element) and have placed it in Appendix A. I have excluded from this list

the middle category mentioned earlier and will address several of those special works in other

contexts. What one will notice even from my conservative estimate, however, is that a significant

portion of Vaughan Williams’s unarranged, finished output (perhaps 15-25%, depending on

one’s method of calculation) intersects in some forthright way with pastoral themes. There are

thus many possible outlets for discussing his pastoral music from strong points of reference.

Going forward, it is useful to reiterate some primary points of this chapter. First, although

pastoral art and literature have many recognizable patterns and conventions in a wider sense,

much of the mode’s character in specific cases depends upon the particular applications of

individual influences, taking into account personal background, experiences, and goals. Second,

when one considers the music of Vaughan Williams that may be called “pastoral,” one finds that

literary and programmatic inspirations are a far more reliable and consistent place to begin

analysis than are the presences (real or alleged) of strictly musical pastoral topics or a “folksong

idiom.” Finally, Vaughan Williams often exhibited a great deal of ambivalence in his attitudes

and his music. Just as the term “pastoral” and its traditions are rife with complications and

28
nuances, one discovers that Vaughan Williams’s music displays similar traits on many levels,

forcing analysts to frequently avoid or qualify overarching judgments. Keeping these points in

mind, I argue, will offer the best platform for beginning to understand Vaughan Williams’s

music and its relationship with the pastoral mode.

29
 Chapter 2
Folksong, the Pastoral Mode, and Vaughan Williams as “Musical Philologist,” ca. 1895-
1914

“Thus by the shepherds secrets are reveal’d,

Which from all other men are kept concealed:
Come to the shepherds then, if you would see
Things deep, things hid, and that mysterious be.”
—John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, First Part52

If using the term “pastoral” to refer to Vaughan Williams’s use of folk songs in or

alongside particular compositions is often problematic, it remains true that his formative

conceptions of English folksong were bound up with certain ruralist attitudes around him. In this

chapter I will explore his idealization of folksong and suggest specific ways in which his

thinking was shaped both by late Victorian cultural influences and by a cherished work of

literature with a peculiar take on the pastoral mode – George Borrow’s Lavengro. As it did for

the protagonist of Lavengro, a special body of knowledge associated with rural regions and with

a forgotten past excited Vaughan Williams’s imagination and helped to shape his artistic identity.

As others have recounted, Vaughan Williams began his folk song collecting in 1903 and

continued to seek them until 1913, not long before his military enlistment the following year. 53

Also well known is the fact that Vaughan Williams’s interest in folksong predated his first trips

into the field by at least several years. Ursula Vaughan Williams recounts that a lecture on

52
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (London: Penguin Classics, 1987), edited by Roger Sharrock, p. 107.
53
For two of the most comprehensive yet concise accounts of Vaughan Williams’s early folksong activities, see
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pp. 23-40; and Tony Kendall, “Through Bushes and Through
Briars…Vaughan Williams’s earliest folk-song collecting,” in Foreman, ed., Vaughan Williams in Perspective, pp. 48-
68. A detailed account of the folk songs Vaughan Williams collected in various regions, as well as a good
introduction to his collecting activities, may be found in Folk Songs Collected By Ralph Vaughan Williams (London:
J.M. Dent & Sons, 1983), edited by Roy Palmer. For broader treatments of English folksong collecting before the
Great War, and the key individuals and issues involved, see Vic Gammon, “Folk Song Collecting in Sussex and
Surrey, 1843-1914,” in History Workshop Journal Vol. 10 (1980), pp. 61-89; Richard Sykes, “The Evolution of
Englishness in the English Folksong Revival, 1890-1914,” in Folk Music Journal Vol. 6, No. 4 (1993), pp. 446-490;
and Dorothy De Val, “The Transformed Village: Lucy Broadwood and Folksong,” in Music and British Culture, 1785-
1914 (Oxford University Press, 2000), edited by Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley, pp. 341-366.

30
folksong brought him to the place where he would hear his first song “in the field,” and prior to

this he was familiar with Lucy Broadwood’s and J.A. Fuller Maitland’s volume English County

Songs.54 This indicates that Vaughan Williams had formulated impressions of folksong before

collecting examples of them. Among these early impressions we have the composer’s own

recollections of key individuals who influenced him. In a later tribute to Cecil Sharp, Vaughan

Williams muses on how both Sharp and his favorite Royal College of Music (RCM) teacher

Hubert Parry influenced his youthful thinking concerning folksong:

But Sharp believed, and we believe, that there, in the

fastness of rural England, was the well-spring of English
music; tunes of classical beauty which vied with all the
most beautiful melody in the world, and traceable to no
source other than the minds of unlettered country men, who
unknown to the squire and the parson were singing their
own songs, and as Hubert Parry says, ‘liked what they
made and made what they liked’….In the domain of theory,
Parry applied the Darwinian theory of evolution to music,
and had proved the necessity of folk song. It remained for
the big man to come along and combine theory and practice
in one…Parry had theoretically traced the evolution of
music from the primitive to the elaborate symphony. It was
left to Sharp to declare, in no half-hearted manner, that here
was something of supreme beauty which had grown up, as
part of our life, with our language and our customs.55

There is much to ponder in these sentiments, particularly concerning their place in

Vaughan Williams’s formative experiences with folksong. The Parry quotation is noteworthy. It

comes from the print version of his inaugural address to the Folk Song Society, which was

54
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., pp. 62, 66. Broadwood’s and Maitland’s English County Songs was published
by The Leadenhall Press in London in 1893.
55
Vaughan Williams, “Cecil Sharp: An Appreciation,” taken from Sharp, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, rev.
Maud Karpeles, 3rd edition (London: Methuen, 1954), pp. v-vi. Quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on
Music, pp. 269-270. In his book on English folk song, Sharp affirms Vaughan Williams’s statements. Sharp writes:
“In bygone days, the ‘common people’ formed no inconsiderable part of the population, and were fairly evenly
distributed between urban and country districts. Nowadays, however, they form an exceedingly small class – if,
indeed they can be called a class at all – and are to be found only in those country districts, which, by reason of
their remoteness, have escaped the infection of modern ideas.” See Sharp, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions
(London: Simpkin and Co., Novello and Co., 1907), p. 4.

31
printed in the March 1, 1899 issue of The Musical Times. Parry was one of the society’s

founding members when it was launched in 1898. This was a short time after Vaughan Williams

graduated from the RCM. Elsewhere in the written version of the address, Parry makes several

statements that conform directly to the rural idealization for which the English folksong

movement has been known, fairly or not. Parry states outright that folksong is “characteristic of

the race – of the quiet reticence of our country districts – of the contented and patient and

courageous folk, always ready to meet what chance shall bring with a cheery heart.” Parry sets

this idyllic characterization against another group of people and another brand of music he saw

as threatening folksong.

Moreover, there is an enemy at the door of folk-music

which is driving it out – namely the popular songs of the
day – and if we compare the genuine old folk-music with
the songs that are driving it out, what an awful abyss
appears! The modern popular song reminds me of the out
circumference of our terribly overgrown towns, where the
jerry-builder holds sway, and where one sees all around the
tawdriness of sham jewellery and shoddy clothes, the dregs
of stale fish, and pawn-shops, set off by the flaming gin-
palaces at the corners of the streets. All these things suggest
to one’s mind the boundless regions of sham. It is for the
people who live in these unhealthy regions, people who
have the most false ideals, who are always scrambling for
subsistence, who think that the commonest rowdyism is the
highest expression of human emotion; for them popular
music is made, and it is made, with a commercial object, of
snippets of musical slang. This is what will drive out folk-
music if we do not save it. The old folk-music is among the
purest products of the human mind. It grew in the hearts of
the people before they devoted themselves assiduously to
the making of quick returns. In the old days they produced
music because it pleased them to make it, and because what
they made pleased them mightily, and that is the only way
in which good music is ever made.56

56
Taken from “A Folk-Song Function,” in The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular Vol. 40, No. 673 (March 1,
1899), pp. 168-169.

32
Parry very clearly sets up the dichotomy of an idyllic rural society versus an urban society ruined

by capitalist endeavor. From there he positions folksong as the music of the former and current

popular music as belonging to the latter and threatening folksong’s purity. Such sentiments

adhere closely to values held by William Morris and others connected with the “Back–to-the-

Land” movement, in which the “English countryside” formed the ideal center of a push to end

what many saw as the evils of urban culture and land encroachment in late nineteenth- and early

twentieth-century England. (I will address this topic more directly in the next chapter.)

In his reflections on Parry and folksong, Vaughan Williams also alludes to Parry’s

conception of it as belonging to an earlier stage of human musical development.57 Parry more

fully sets forth his theory on the place of folksong within the evolutionary sequence of musical

expression in a chapter of his book The Evolution of the Art of Music, first published in 1896 as a

lengthened version of an earlier book, The Art of Music (1893), and issued in multiple

subsequent printings.58 Toward the end of the chapter, and alongside commentary on the

emotional and aesthetic characters of different geographical areas’ folk songs, Parry offers a

convenient summary of his views on musical evolution:

So far the process of development is very easily followed.

The savage stage indicates a taste for design, but an
incapacity for making the designs consistent and logical; in
the lowest intelligent stage the capacity for disposing short
contrasting figures in an orderly and intelligent way is
shown; in the highest phase of the pattern-type of folk-tune
the instinct for knitting things closely together is shown to
be very remarkable; and the organization of the tunes

57
Given the prominence of Parry’s views in the English folksong movement, and their influence upon Vaughan
Williams’s early conception of English folksong, the reader may wonder what role Vaughan Williams’s other
famous teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford, had. According to Paul Rodmell, Stanford’s approach to folksong was
instinctive rather than research-driven. The latter’s edition of the volume The Petrie Collection of Irish Music shows
a lack of editorial rigor and instead groups tunes according to character. When it came to formulating ideas about
folksong, Stanford largely relied upon the work of others. See Rodmell, Charles Villiers Stanford (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2002), pp. 391-394.
58
The Art of Music was first published in London in 1893 by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co. Limited.

33
 becomes completely consistent from every point of view. A
still higher phase is that which the skill in distributing the
figures in symmetrical patterns is applied to the ends of
emotional expression.59

It is an open question how far Vaughan Williams subscribed to this particular analysis. In a

sense, at least, Vaughan Williams’s idea of folksong displays kinship with Parry’s. Beyond the

notion of segregating popular urban music from country folksong (though, as discussed in

Chapter 1, he had the ability to see past this division), Vaughan Williams shared with Parry the

belief in an evolutionary model of folksong. In particular, before 1914 Vaughan Williams

embraced the concept of a large repertory of folksongs existing autonomously and arising from

individual people’s idiosyncratic performances of them. He held the idea that they were timeless

artifacts to be collected by the careful recorder, that transcended individual people, and that

could link modern English musical culture with its national heritage. As late as the composer’s

lectures on music given in United States in the 1930s, and collected in print form in National

Music and Other Essays, he was reiterating similar ideas.60

This then is the evolution of the folk-song. One man

invents a tune. (I repeat that I grant this much only for the
sake of argument.) He sings it to his neighbours and his
children. After he is dead the next generation carry it on.
Perhaps by this time a new set of words have appeared in a
different metre for which no tune is available. What more
natural than to adapt some already existing tune to the new
words? Now where will that tune be after three or four
generations? There will indeed by that time not be one tune
but many quite distinct tunes, nevertheless, all traceable to
the parent stem.61
59
Hubert Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1920), pp. 76-
77. For more information concerning the influences upon Parry’s views on culture and history, see Jeremy Dibble,
“Parry as Historiographer,” in Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies Vol. 1 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999),
edited by Bennett Zon, pp. 37-51.
60
The fact that Vaughan Williams’s 1912 remarks on folksong in English Folk-Songs were reprinted until 1953 with
such little alteration also testifies to a remarkable consistency of these views as he held them over much of his life.
61
Vaughan Williams, “The Evolution of Folk-Song,” in National Music and Other Essays, p. 31. Vaughan Williams
speaks further to the content of these remarks in an earlier chapter of the same collection, entitled “Some
Tentative Ideas on the Origins of Music,” and actually cites Parry’s book multiple times. (See pp. 12-20.)

34
In an Encyclopaedia Britannica article published earlier, in 1929, Vaughan Williams makes

similar comments, on this occasion invoking a key tenet of his great uncle Darwin’s theory of

evolution:

Thus a folk-song evolves gradually as it passes through the

hands of different men and different generations. Nor will
this gradual change ever be a process of deterioration,
because those versions of the tune which are distasteful to
others will die a natural death. Here then is a clear case of
survival of the fittest. A tune which has been handed down
from father to son through many generations will represent
the united imaginations of thousands of men and women
through hundreds of years of evolution.62

Thus, Vaughan Williams shared with Parry if not identical views, at least the conviction that

folksong existed on an evolutionary continuum.63 On account of Vaughan Williams’s own

statements, his reference to Parry’s views in connection with his formative experiences, and his

close relationship with Parry as his pupil, it is highly likely that the older man’s models

influenced Vaughan Williams’s thinking.

Closely related to these ideas and impressions, there is the sense in some of Vaughan

Williams’s pre-war remarks on folksong that he subscribed to the notion that the countryside and

those who inhabited it were the sources of special, even mysterious knowledge. He was hardly

alone in this, as Cecil Sharp also articulated early on his belief in a rural population untouched by

modern influences and still holding special knowledge with regard to folksong.64 Vaughan

Williams’s earliest recollection of contact with folksong brims with such sentiments. A story

62 th
Vaughan Williams, “Folk-Song,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, ix (14 edn, London: Encyclopaedia Britannica,
1929), pp. 447-448. Quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, pp. 229-230. Darwin died when the
young Vaughan Williams had not yet reached ten years of age. There is a brief anecdote offered by Ursula Vaughan
Williams recalling a time when the 6-7 year-old child was at one point alone in a room with his famous older
relative. See Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., pp. 10-13.
63
For more discussion on Vaughan Williams’s conception of folksong along these lines, see Onderdonk, “Vaughan
Williams’s folksong transcriptions: a case of idealization?” in Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies, pp. 118-138.
64
See Sharp, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, p. 4.

35
related in multiple sources both by Vaughan Williams and others recounts how he heard his first

musical specimen in the “field” when he was invited to a village tea party in Essex late in 1903,

ironically to give a lecture on folksong, and a shepherd by the name of “Mr. Pottiphar” sang

“Bushes and Briars”.65 How fitting that this event occurred in a rural area, with a shepherd singer

(that ever-iconic pastoral figure), featuring a folksong in triple meter and having thoroughly

pastoral lyrics.

Ex. 2.1: “Bushes and Briars” (Showing the First Stanza of Lyrics)66

Vaughan Williams himself likened this experience to having seen a ghost walk, citing it as the

completion of his education on folksong.67 In 1906, Vaughan Williams hinted at similar feelings

in print:

I could imagine a much less profitable way of spending a

long winter evening than in the parlour of a country inn
taking one’s turn at the mug of ‘four-ale’ – (surely the most
innocuous of all beverages), in the rare company of minds
imbued with that fine sense which comes from advancing
years and a life-long communion with nature – and with the

65
For accounts of this story, see Vaughan Williams, Tony Kendall, “Through Bushes and Through Briars…Vaughan
Williams’s earliest folk-song collecting,” in Foreman, ed., Vaughan Williams in Perspective, pp. 48-68.
66
Source: Roy Palmer, ed., Folk Songs Collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 27.
67
Vaughan Williams, “Let Us Remember…Early Days,” in English Dance and Song Vol. 6, No. 3 (1942), pp. 27-28.
Quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, p. 253. The account that Vaughan Williams gives of the event
in English Folk-Songs, presumably dating from the 1912 writing, is remarkably consistent with how it is described in
this excerpt. (See Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, pp. 185-188.)

36
 ever-present chance of picking up some rare old ballad or
an exquisitely beautiful melody, worthy, within its smaller
compass, of a place beside the finest compositions of the
greatest composers.68

Vaughan Williams shared similar thoughts some six years later in English Folk-Songs:

We can imagine the earnest student saying to himself…‘I

will try and find out the absolutely unsophisticated, though
naturally musical, man – one who has no learning, and no
contact with learning, one who cannot read or write, and
thus repeat anything stereotyped by others, one whose
utterance, therefore, is purely spontaneous and unself-
conscious…’ To such an enquirer the answer is found in
the folk-song. The imaginary man becomes an actuality.
We do really find in every country among those people
whose utterances must of necessity be spontaneous and
unsophisticated – namely, the unlettered and untravelled
portion of the community – a form of musical art unwritten,
handed down by tradition, hardly self-conscious, which is
their special property, and this music is not mere clownish
nonsense, but has in it the germ of all those principles of
beauty, of expression, of form, climax and proportion
which we are accustomed to look for in the highly
developed compositions of great masters. Face to face with
this fact, we need no longer feel surprised that an unlettered
countryman can inherit from his still more unlettered
forefathers a melody like Bushes and Briars – adding,
without doubt, to it something peculiarly his own.69

Here Vaughan Williams connects ownership of folksong with rural people he calls “unlettered”

and “unsophisticated.” These people nonetheless have special lore of their own, bequeathed to

them by older generations and developed further in individual usage.70 Such sentiments would,

of course, understandably follow from the ideas shared by Parry and Sharp that the realm of
68
Vaughan Williams, “Preface [to a Folk Song Collection],” in Journal of the Folk Song Society Vol. 2, No. 8 (1906),
pp. 141-142. Quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, pp. 181-182.
69
Vaughan Williams, English Folk-Songs. Quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, p. 191.
70
Once more, Julian Onderdonk has explored this issue extensively, coming to the conclusion that Vaughan
Williams did idealize folksong as belonging primarily to rural society, though he could see through this
preconception at times. See Onderdonk: “Vaughan Williams’s folksong transcriptions: a case of idealization?,” in
Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies, pp. 118-138; “Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Folksong Collecting: English
Nationalism and the Rise of Professional Society,” chapters 4-8; and “Hymn Tunes from Folk-songs: Vaughan
Williams and English Hymnody,” in Adams and Wells, eds., Vaughan Williams Essays, pp. 103-128.

37
authentic folk music encompassed the non-urban areas and that this music traversed an

evolutionary trajectory. (However, here Vaughan Williams seems readier than Parry to grant

folksong a measure of equality with what his teacher considered to be “more developed” music.)

Some patterns suggest that Vaughan Williams’s surroundings and personal interests

helped to spur his imagination as well. His earliest juvenile recollections of folk songs, for

example, outline significant points of contact. In a series of remarks that recall the early pastoral

experiences covered in Chapter 1, Vaughan Williams offers this key remembrance:

But my real awakening to folk song did not come till 1898
when English County Songs came into my hands and I
lighted on the ‘Lazarus’ tune as it is given there. When one
comes across something great and new, if it is great
enough, one’s attitude is not of surprise but of recognition,
‘but I have known this all my life’. I felt like this when I
heard later Wagner, when I first saw Michael Angelo’s
Night and Day, [and] when I first visited Stonehenge. I
immediately recognized these things which had always
been in my unconscious self.71

Multiple literary works that Vaughan Williams favored in his youth draw from the notion of the

countryside being the realm of special knowledge and phenomena. There is Bunyan’s The

Pilgrim’s Progress, a book that Vaughan Williams especially cherished, and the narrative of

which showcases the protagonist’s – Christian’s – encounters with a host of unique characters in

often geographically remote, far-flung, and/or fantastic settings. But another book arguably

makes this notion an even more central concern – George Borrow’s Lavengro (1851). In

discussing this work and its relationship to Vaughan Williams in more detail, I hope that its

themes’ similarities to the composer’s early experiences with folksong will become apparent.

71
Vaughan Williams, “Let Us Remember…Early Days,” quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, p. 252.
Manning mentions in an accompanying footnote the discrepancy between this story as Vaughan Williams relays it
here and the same account as it appears in the composer’s “A Musical Autobiography,” which may be found in
pages 177-194 of National Music and Other Essays. In the latter writing, Vaughan Williams states that he first came
across English County Songs in the same year it was first published – 1893. (See National Music and Other Essays,
p. 189, and Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, p. 252, footnote “a.”)

38
 George Henry Borrow (1803-1881) occupies a unique if somewhat obscure place in

British literature. While never having the stature of Dickens, the Brontë sisters, or his other more

famous contemporaries, Borrow was much more known to nineteenth- and early twentieth-

century audiences (particularly in England) than at any time and place afterward. Perhaps his

largest following consisted of young males around the turn of the century who were drawn to his

idiosyncratic adventure writings. Vaughan Williams was a part of this demographic of

admirers.72

With one notable exception, George Borrow and his works rarely receive discussion in

the literature on Vaughan Williams.73 Some mentions may be found in Ursula Vaughan

Williams’s biography of her husband, where she writes that he, in the last months of his life, re-

read with her his favorite novel, Lavengro.74 This is striking because in her book, in Michael

Kennedy’s life and works volume, and in other writings on Vaughan Williams, we find plenty of

discussion of literature he did and did not set to music, with ample indication of how much

particular authors’ work meant to him. However, in the case of Lavengro, explicitly cited by the

one closest to him as the composer’s “favourite” novel, such discussion is scarce. Even in the

composer’s own writings one encounters almost no references to Borrow. Those found in his

letters include the composer’s suggestion to Harold Child (librettist for Vaughan Williams’s

opera Hugh the Drover) that one of the scenes should emulate portions from The Zincali (first

published 1841), one of Borrow’s earlier works. Another letter to Child reveals that his next

72
There is a lack of recent monograph literature on George Borrow. Two volumes from the early 1980s that
address his character and writings are worth mentioning. See Michael Collie, George Borrow: Eccentric (Cambridge
University Press, 1982); and David Williams, A World of His Own: The Double Life of George Borrow (Oxford
University Press, 1982).
73
The exception is Roger Savage’s recent article “Vaughan Williams, The Romany Ryes, and the Cambridge
Ritualists,” in Music & Letters Vol. 83, No. 3 (August 2002), pp. 383-418.
74
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., pp. 311, 393. It is worth mentioning here that Ursula Vaughan Williams’s
volume, for all of its many merits, contains index flaws. For example, the index indicates that Lavengro is discussed
on page 393, but neglects to mention that pages 311 and 405 also give mention of the book.

39
opera might be Lavengro, the composer having “always had this in [his] mind.”75 Beyond this

we have very little, and Vaughan Williams did not set any of Borrow’s works to music in a direct

manner.76

In accounting for the gulf between Ursula Vaughan Williams’s attestation of Lavengro as

being Vaughan Williams’s favorite novel, and the near-absence of any further direct information

on this relationship in the principal texts on the composer, one begins to find answers in tracing

the work’s character and reception history. First published in 1851, Lavengro: The Scholar, The

Gypsy, The Priest (to give its full title) is a something of a hybrid, being part memoir, part

philosophical testament, and part adventure novel. No one seems sure where and to what degree

Borrow is describing actual people and events from his own past or merely spinning fictional

material.77 The story recounts in first person the significant stages and episodes of its

protagonist’s youth. (Borrow declines to name himself throughout the book.) While still a child,

he comes to know various regions and peoples of Britain as he follows his father through

sequential military postings, often wandering off by himself in search of adventure. The author

later recounts his disappointing first adult years in London, following the death of his father, as a

translator/copier prior to setting out on the road once more as a self-taught tinker. Early in the

narrative, the protagonist develops a keen interest in languages and cultural history. Many of the

chapters in Lavengro concern his encounters in often desolate corners of Britain, where he

demonstrates a knack for coming across fabulous ruins and natural scenes, and meeting eccentric
75
The letter is reprinted in Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 405.
76
Roger Savage has pointed out that the short brass piece written by Vaughan Williams in honor of the conductor
Sir John Barbirolli – Flourish for Glorious John – contains in its title a reference to Borrow’s publisher, John Murray
II. Borrow places a reference to him in chapter 43 of Lavengro. See Savage, “Vaughan Williams, The Romany Ryes,
and the Cambridge Ritualists,” p. 408. Savage also draws several parallels between themes in Vaughan Williams’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress and other works, and themes prominent in Lavengro. (See pages 409-412.)
77
One of Borrow’s early biographers, Herbert Jenkins, offered relevant remarks on this matter: “In the main
Lavengro would appear to be autobiographical up to the period of Borrow’s coming to London. After this he begins
to indulge somewhat in the dramatic.” See Jenkins, The Life of George Borrow (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons,
1912), p. 397.

40
characters.78 Among the latter, the protagonist befriends the mysterious Romany people – the

gypsies – who at the time the story is set in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and long

after, wandered throughout Britain and practiced their traditional customs and language. It was

these people, claims the author in chapter 17, who gave him the name “Lavengro,” meaning

“word master” in the Romany tongue.

Two primary themes stand out in Lavengro. One is the glorification of the vagabond life,

as Borrow’s early biographer Herbert Jenkins wrote.79 The other is the pursuit of philology, the

study of historical languages and cultural history. Taken together with a third theme, Borrow’s

fervent patriotism, these strands support a larger angle that informs most of the events and

encounters in the book: that Britain has been the scene of many exotic and fascinating peoples

who have formed the identity of the region in ways hardly remembered or imagined by many.

Indeed, one of the very first series of remarks in the author’s preface to the first edition of

Lavengro reads thus:

The scenes of action lie in the British Islands. Pray be not

displeased, gentle reader, if perchance thou hast imagined
that I was about to conduct thee to distant lands, and didst
promise thyself much instruction and entertainment from
what I might tell thee of them. I do assure thee that thou
hast no reason to be displeased, inasmuch as there are no
countries in the world less known by the British than these
selfsame British Islands, or where more strange things are
every day occurring, whether in road, street, house or
dingle.80

78
Vaughan Williams’s friend and Cambridge classmate – the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan – mentions
Lavengro in one of his monographs. He writes that it is “a book that breathes the spirit of that period of strong and
eccentric characters.” See Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century (1782-1919) (London: Longmans,
Green and Co., 1922), p. 171.
79
Jenkins, The Life of George Borrow, p. 398.
80
George Borrow, Preface to First Edition of Lavengro (London: John Murray, 1851), p. vii.

41
Other opening statements by the author set the tone for the entire book. He claims that as a child,

he was “a lover of nooks and retired corners” and “in the habit of fleeing from society.”81 The

very first sentence of the second chapter reads: “I have been a wanderer the greater part of my

life.”82 Although Borrow places part of his story in London, he makes it clear both in those and

subsequent chapters that he considered his time there a failure and was glad to take to the road

once more.83 In any case, the bulk of the protagonist’s strange encounters and philological

explorations occur in the non-urban regions he explored. These properly set up, in the words of

Ian Duncan, “the revitalization of pastoral with the anthropological trope of nomadism.”84

The philological dimension of Lavengro holds some distinctive patterns that recall

Vaughan Williams’s attitudes on folksong collecting. While still a juvenile, the protagonist

becomes curious about the different people and cultures he meets on his travels. He commits

himself to the study of philology, learning among other languages Irish and Welsh. This was a

reflection of his exposure to both peoples and their cultures, partially through his father’s posting

in Ireland. In one passage of chapter 13, the author states: “It has been said, I believe, that the

more languages a man speaks, the more a man is he; which is very true, provided he acquires

languages as a medium for becoming acquainted with the thoughts and feelings of the various

sections into which the human race is divided.”85 More than this, languages become for the

protagonist in Lavengro a means of exploring the cultural histories of human races, particularly

those connected with Britain. One passage directly describes this interest, concerning as it does

81
Ibid, p. 13.
82
Ibid, p. 17.
83
Ibid, chapters 54 and 58.
84
See Ian Duncan, “Wild England: George Borrow’s Nomadology,” in Victorian Studies Vol. 41, No. 3, Victorian
Ethnographies (Spring, 1998), pp. 381-403 (quote on p. 382). Duncan’s article is an excellent study of how Borrow’s
brands of nomadology and philology embody unique and significant forms of Englishness, which through their later
popularity asserted themselves as cultural nostalgia during a time when industrialization and other modernizing
efforts were underway in Britain.
85
Borrow, Lavengro, p. 171.

42
his study of Welsh as a result of being introduced to the verses of the medieval Welsh bard Ab

Gwilym.

If I remember right, I found the language a difficult one; in

mastering it, however, I derived unexpected assistance
from what of Irish remained in my head, and I soon found
that they were cognate dialects, springing from some old
tongue which itself, perhaps, had sprung from one much
older. And here I cannot help observing cursorily that I
every now and then, whilst studying this Welsh, generally
supposed to be the original tongue of Britain, encountered
words which, according to the lexicographers, were
venerable words, highly expressive, showing the wonderful
power and originality of the Welsh, in which, however,
they were no longer used in common discourse, but were
relics, precious relics, of the first speech of Britain, perhaps
of the world…86

It is worth pausing here to notice the similarity of sentiments, if not exact content, between this

passage and certain comments of Vaughan Williams concerning his folksong collecting. The

similarities deepen when considering that Lavengro’s protagonist goes on to explain that mere

books did not suffice to teach him about Welsh, but rather these did so in tandem with first-hand

experience, in this case listening to the actual conversation of his gypsy friends.87

This last point forms the philological center of Lavengro. The protagonist’s meeting,

befriending, and unending fascination with the gypsies lent to his view of them as people whose

mysterious language and knowledge went hand in hand with the marvel-filled countryside he

loved to wander. He further believed that they were a people whose unique language, which he

and others later in the book call “the language of the roads,” might offer clues to a distant past. 88

As such, they were a driving cause behind his philological endeavors. Shortly after forming a

86
Borrow, Lavengro, p. 248.
87
In the already cited English Folk-Songs, Vaughan Williams offers something very similar in the opening section:
“What I am about to try to give you today is first-hand knowledge straight from the human subject, without any
intervention of book knowledge at all,” quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, p. 185.
88
Borrow, Lavengro, chapters 89-90.

43
fast friendship with a Romany man by the name of Jasper Petulengro, Lavengro’s protagonist

offers these summary remarks on his relationship with this people henceforth. Once more, I

quote at length to illustrate:

I soon found that I became acquainted with a most singular

people, whose habits and pursuits awakened within me the
highest interest. Of all connected with them, however, their
language was doubtless that which exercised the greatest
influence over my imagination. I had at first some
suspicion that it would prove a mere made-up gibberish.
But I was soon undeceived. Broken, corrupted, and half in
ruins as it was, it was not long before I found that it was an
original speech, far more so, indeed, than one or two others
of high name and celebrity, which, up to that time, I had
been in the habit of regarding with respect and veneration.
Indeed, many obscure points connected with the vocabulary
of these languages, and to which neither classic nor modern
lore afforded any clue, I thought I could now clear up by
means of this strange broken tongue, spoken by people who
dwelt among thickets and furze bushes, in tents as tawny as
their faces, and whom the generality of mankind
designated, and with much semblance of justice, as thieves
and vagabonds. But where did this speech come from, and
who were they who spoke it? These were the questions
which I could not solve…89

The protagonist’s fascination with gypsies as a “singular” people possessing mysterious

knowledge and roaming the countryside acts further as a means of self-discovery. In her book on

gypsies and their influence on the British, Deborah Epstein Nord offers a keen discussion of this

matter. She writes: “In two volumes of uncertain genre, Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye

(1857), Borrow tells the tale of a man who finds his identity as a wanderer and discovers in the

English Gypsies he encounters along the way a template for both vagabondage and authenticity

of being,” adding directly after that Borrow considered his gypsies the opposite of the genteel

89
Ibid, pp. 226-227.

44
British classes.90 Nord continues by describing how Lavengro mesmerized readers on the

account of asking questions about “ultimate origins” and feeding the then-prevalent fascination

with gypsies and exotic languages.91 Borrow’s own interest in gypsies came at a time when

historical linguists were discovering roots and characteristics of what we now call the Indo-

European languages. The Romany language was first thought around this time to trace to India

and share possible origins with English as a fellow Indo-European tongue.92

Before discussing the corollaries between Lavengro’s driving principles and Vaughan

Williams’s early-formed attitudes concerning folksong, it is useful to consider the reception of

the book up to and including the time when Vaughan Williams knew it. The response

immediately following its release in 1851 was seen as largely negative by those who wrote about

Borrow around the turn of the twentieth century. Borrow himself claims in appendices to

subsequent printings of Lavengro that he was abused by critics. The author’s wife wrote a letter

to his publisher, in which she exclaimed “if ever a book experienced infamous and undeserved

treatment it was that book.”93 This at one time appears to have been a matter of some debate, as

is evidenced by a later article that re-examines the early reception of Lavengro. In this article the

author, J.E. Tilford Jr., claimed that only six of eighteen reviews were outright negative ones,

and that many were on the whole positive. He goes on to cite how much of the negativity was

due to the uncertain genre of the book, and the question of whether it was fact or fiction, rather

than to purely content-related concerns.94

90
Deborah Epstein Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930 (New York: Columbia University Press,
2006), p. 71.
91
Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, p. 72, 88.
92
William Jones, who spent time in British-controlled India in the late eighteenth century, was one of the first to
suggest similarities between Indian and English word patterns.
93
Mary Borrow, letter to publisher John Murray dated 29 January 1855. Quoted in Jenkins, The Life of George
Borrow, p. 430.
94
See J. E. Tilford Jr., “Contemporary Criticism of ‘Lavengro’: A Re-Examination,” in Studies in Philology Vol. 41, No.
3 (July, 1944), pp. 442-456. Tilford cites and discusses many of the early reviews.

45
 What is beyond doubt, however, is that Lavengro became quite popular among the

literary class of English readers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an essay

on the English perception of gypsies in the nineteenth century, M.A. Crowther claims that

Lavengro was “the book chiefly responsible for romanticizing the vagrant life.” He then

summarizes its reception history:

Borrow’s reception by the reading public was curious:

neither of his gypsy books [Lavengro and Romany Rye]
sold well at the time of publication, but by the late
nineteenth century they were esteemed by literary men, and
were being produced in numerous cheap reprints,
recommended especially to the adventurous young.95

In support of this, Crowther cites two contemporaneous remarks that are worth reproducing in

the service of this chapter. First, consider this excerpt by Lionel Johnson from an 1899 piece in

praise of Borrow. Notice the similarity between it and Parry’s description of urban versus non-

urban culture:

Written by a man of intense personality, irresistible in his

hold upon your attention, [Borrow’s books] take you far
afield from weary cares and business into the enamouring
airs of the open world, and into days when the countryside
was uncontaminated by the vulgar conventions which form
the worst side of ‘civilized’ life in the cities. They give you
the sense of emancipation, of manumission, into the liberty
of the winding road and fragrant forest, into the freshness
of ancient country-life, into a milieu where men are not
copies of each other.96

As Crowther writes, Lavengro had attained a celebrated status by the Edwardian period. He cites

another of Borrow’s biographers, Clement King Shorter, who wrote this in 1913: “May we not

say that an enthusiasm for Borrow’s Lavengro is now a touchstone of taste in English prose

95
M.A. Crowther, “The Tramp,” in Myths of the English (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), edited by Roy Porter, p.
106.
96
Lionel Pigot Johnson, “O Rare George Borrow!” in The Outlook 1 April, 1899. Quoted in Post Liminium: Essays
and Critical Papers (London: E. Matthews, 1911), edited by Thomas Whittemore, p. 203. See also Crowther, “The
Tramp,” p. 106.

46
literature?”97 Crowther could also have quoted Shorter some pages later, where the latter

compares Lavengro’s popularity at the time of initial publication to the status it had achieved in

1913: “It only remains here to state the melancholy fact once again that Lavengro, great work of

literature as it is now universally acknowledged to be, was not ‘the book of the year’.”98

Although there seems to be no source that chronicles exactly when Vaughan Williams

came to know and love Lavengro, we can safely deduce that this occurred while he was quite

young. Wilfrid Mellers writes that the book was among Vaughan Williams’s boyhood favorites,

and while Mellers does not cite any source supporting his statement, his claim seems likely.99

First it is worth bearing in mind that, as Crowther has stated, Lavengro was particularly marketed

toward young readers during the era he describes. Second, Vaughan Williams’s letter to Harold

Child, in which he expresses his desire to compose an opera on Lavengro, bears the date

“Summer 1910” in parentheses where it appears in Ursula’s book. In this letter Vaughan

Williams relays to Child that “I’ve always had this in mind” right after mentioning a possible

Lavengro project. If we can trust the given date, and there is no reason why we should not, these

words strongly indicate that the 37-year-old Vaughan Williams had come to know the book long

since. Still other information supports this likelihood. We know, for example, that Vaughan

Williams himself collected folk songs from gypsies.100 Jan Marsh reminds us that a fascination

with gypsies was an integral part of the late Victorian folk movement, citing Vaughan

97
Clement King Shorter, George Borrow and His Circle (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), p.
278. Quoted in Crowther, “The Tramp,” p. 106.
98
Shorter, George Borrow and His Circle, p. 287.
99
Mellers, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion, p. 27. I allow that Mellers and others may have had access
to a source that would support this specific claim (perhaps Ursula Vaughan Williams’s testimony), but I have
neither had access to it myself nor seen it mentioned.
100
See Savage, “Vaughan Williams, The Romany Ryes, and the Cambridge Ritualists,” p. 384; and Onderdonk,
“Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Folksong Collecting: English Nationalism and the Rise of Professional Society,” p. 243.

47
Williams’s unrealized opera on Lavengro in the course of her discussion.101 It is highly unlikely

that, even if Lavengro was not the sole motivation for Vaughan Williams’s early fascination with

folksong, the book did not play some role in his consciousness and imagination during the course

of his excursions. All available information thus collectively points to Vaughan Williams’s

introduction to Lavengro occurring in his formative years. And so we return to the era that saw

the development of his interest in folksong.

The article by Roger Savage cited earlier thoroughly recounts both Vaughan Williams’s

relationship to Victorian and Edwardian gypsophilia (fascination with gypsies) and his

accompanying musical interest in the idea of the rural wanderer. It also explores both existing

and possible manifestations of Lavengro in certain operatic works by Vaughan Williams (in

particular Hugh the Drover), as well as the novel’s likenesses to other important themes and

literary works in Vaughan Williams’s life. The composer’s fondness for Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s

Progress in particular finds certain parallels in Lavengro. Both conform to parameters of the

picaresque (an episodic narrative describing the exploits of an adventurous hero) and, perhaps

more importantly, the Bildungsroman (a narrative tracing the personal development of a central

character).102 There is considerable evidence that Vaughan Williams viewed his own life as a

man and as an artist in terms that recall the latter genre. (I will explore this matter more fully in

Chapters 3 and 6.) However, in comparing Vaughan Williams’s statements pertaining to his

early idealization of folksong with Lavengro’s protagonist’s philological aims and experiences,

some other acute similarities present themselves. These strongly suggest that the strange book

101
Jan Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England, from 1880 to 1914 (London: Quartet
Books, 1982), p. 88.
102
I use the term “Bildungsroman” loosely in describing The Pilgrim’s Progress. Although Bunyan’s book bears
certain similarities to a Bildungsroman, its publication predates the formation of the genre in Germany during the
early Romantic literary period. For more information on the beginnings of the German Bildungsroman, see Todd
Curtis Kontje, The German Bildungsroman: History of a Genre (Camden House, 1993); and Michael Minden, The
German Bildungsroman: Incest and Inheritance (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

48
that became the composer’s favorite novel not only inspired various passages of his

compositions and even prompted him to want to create an opera out of it, but it probably also

acted as a significant stimulant upon his personal idealization of folksong.

Let us consider the evidence. Despite the fact that Borrow’s protagonist worked with

spoken language and Vaughan Williams worked with folksong, both clearly demonstrated the

attitude that valuable knowledge was to be had from those who inhabited the rural regions of

England. According to both, this special knowledge served as a testament to the rich traditions

existing inside the borders of Britain that had been spurned or unnoticed by many of its

inhabitants. This knowledge could form the basis both for cultural and national rediscovery,

casting as it does non-urban England as the scene of ample “at-home exoticism,” to use Nord’s

term.103 Both also viewed their collected knowledge in essentially philological fashion,

expressing their belief that these materials evolved or were handed down from earlier versions

and thus contained vital links and clues to an irretrievable past. Finally, both Lavengro’s

protagonist and Vaughan Williams admit in their respective statements that the discovery of the

gypsy language in the case of one, and folksong in the case of the other, were moments of self-

discovery in their own lives and careers. Hence, in addition to finding reflections of Borrow’s

characters, scenes, and narratives in Vaughan Williams’s operas and other works, as Savage has

compellingly discussed, we find that the Lavengro’s protagonist’s attitudes concerning his

philological pursuits almost startlingly parallel with those Vaughan Williams expressed from his

earliest writings on folksong. Additionally, the only place where Vaughan Williams himself

mentioned Borrow in any way other than expressing a desire to create an opera based upon

Lavengro was when he wrote to Harold Child with the express wish that certain scenes in what

became Hugh the Drover, his “folk song opera,” be based on materials from The Zincali. Early
103
Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, p. 3

49
in The Zincali, Borrow recalls a prize fight at which he was present as a teenager. The prize fight

scene occurs in Vaughan Williams’s completed opera at the end of Act I. Something similar is

present in Lavengro as well, with the protagonist making it a point at several junctures not to shy

away from physical confrontation.

These parallels take on greater weight when considering the place of philology in

Victorian and Edwardian historical studies, and the role that all of these played in the folksong

revival in which Vaughan Williams participated. The urge to discover the past through special

knowledge and materials of the present occurred across a wide spectrum. In the closing pages of

his dissertation, Julian Onderdonk calls attention to this important overarching trend that formed

the background of folksong collecting around the turn of the twentieth century. He writes: “It

must be remembered that at the time Vaughan Williams was collecting there was a strong

climate of scholarly opinion that sought an ‘Ur-text’ for cultural artifacts that had been

transmitted over time.”104 At least some of this climate is traceable to scholastic developments in

the nineteenth century. Dennis Taylor writes:

The Victorian period represents the climax of the once

widely held commonplace that the function of history is to
help us to understand the present…The 1860s in particular
was [sic] intensely caught up in the quest for origins as a
key to self-knowledge and general understanding…The
successes of archaeology and anthropology in the 1860s
encouraged a return to historical and, within limits,
etymological understanding.105

In this climate the term “philology” came to accrue multiple layers of meaning beyond its

mere association with the study of language. J.W. Burrow writes:

104
Onderdonk, “Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Folksong Collecting: English Nationalism and the Rise of Professional
Society,” p. 325.
105
Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 207-208.

50
 In its primary sense, in the first half of the nineteenth
century [philology] still tend to mean the general study of
classical literature scholarship tout court…By the mid-
century, however, the meaning of philology, and hence, in
a sense, men’s notions of the humanities in general, and of
the place of them of [sic] the study of language, was
changing rapidly…[referencing] ethnology, history, and
geography.106

Even where the term “philology” was employed to refer to linguistic study, the pursuit shared

goals with other endeavors in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Scholars treating

the subject tell us that the mid- nineteenth century saw philology shift to an approach that aimed

for greater empiricism, whereas before, the intended emphasis was along more philosophical

lines. In an important book on the study of language in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-

century England, Hans Aarsleff writes:

It is universally agreed that the decisive turn in language

study occurred when the philosophical, a priori method of
the eighteenth century was abandoned in favor of the
historical, a priori method of the nineteenth. The former
began with the mental categories and sought their
exemplification in language, as in universal grammar, and
based etymology on conjectures about the origin of
language. The latter sought only facts, evidence, and
demonstration; it divorced the study of language from the
study of mind.107

Still, whatever the empirical aims of new philologists, their research was not always backed by

wholly scientific means. Dennis Taylor’s study on Hardy and philology discusses how scientific

and historical methods of investigating the past nonetheless led to intense speculation beyond

what researchers’ tools could reveal. Citing the example of the German-born Max Müller, one of

the most publicly visible philologists living in Victorian England and who was interested in

106
J.W. Burrow, “The Uses of Philology in Victorian England,” in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in
Honor of George Kitson Clark (New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 1967), edited by Robert Robson, p. 181.
107
Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England 1780-1860 (London: The Athlone Press, and Minneapolis: The
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 127.

51
language study as a window into religious history108, Taylor discusses this tension. He writes:

“Thus, the new philologist, having set out on modest historicist and comparative grounds,

sometimes ended in the sort of philosophical speculation which the new philology had reacted

against.” Taylor describes how for Müller and others the mystery of ultimate origins, the original

“Ur-language,” continued to tantalize even new philologists while remaining hopelessly out of

reach from an empirical standpoint.109

According to this information, a picture emerges from mid-nineteenth-century England of

certain historical and linguistic researchers caught between their desire for empirically based

discovery on the one hand and their seemingly irresistible tendency to allow their imaginations a

prominent place in their endeavors. This raises the question: What beyond a mere interest in

roots could prompt such a dilemma? One, and possibly the, answer lies in the cultural and

political preoccupations of the time and place in question. In many countries of nineteenth-

century Western Europe, philology stood with other historical disciplines amidst widely felt

urges to seek out and establish national roots and identities. In his essay already cited, Burrow

describes how the comparative philological discipline that became increasingly prominent

among enthusiasts and historians in latter nineteenth-century England had beginnings in

Germany, where philology was linked with typical adjuncts of nationalism – folklore and the

Romantic movement.110 (Germany was also, as discussed earlier, the birthplace of the

Bildungsroman genre.) According to Roy Harris (not the American symphonist), what really

108
For a primer on Max Müller’s aims presented within a summary view of Victorian philology, consult Richard
Maxwell’s article “Philology,” in Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (New York & London: The Greenwood Press,
1998), edited by Sally Mitchell, pp. 598-599.
109
Taylor, Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology, pp. 242-247. For more information on Max Müller’s
religious philological endeavors consult Chapter 5 of Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion,
and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press), pp. 82-92.
110
Burrow, “The Uses of Philology in Victorian Britain,“ pp. 182 ff.

52
drove comparative philology at root was nationalist politics. This was especially so in Western

European nations looking to justify their influence and expansion, and in some cases their

attempts to establish racial credentials. The Victorians, for example, formed speculations about

ancient roots and languages that fitted their political and imperial narratives.111

Not only were philology and other historical disciplines in nineteenth-century Britain

often inextricably bound up with cultural politics, but all of these currents also formed the

background to the English Folk Revival of which folk music became a major part. In her widely

quoted book The Imagined Village, Georgina Boyes describes how these historical pursuits, as

well as the new influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution, helped to situate folk singers as

precious sources of knowledge that not only provided a window to the past but also were fast

disappearing in the first decade of the twentieth century. Boyes shows that these were

constructions necessary for the Folk Revival’s purpose of offering an alternative mode of living

to the industrialization that many saw as nefarious.112 Interspersed throughout the writings of

major English folk song collectors is this very idea – that folksong was dying out and that quick

work needed to be done to preserve it in its “authentic form.” The excerpt from Cecil Sharp’s

1907 book quoted in an earlier footnote, as well as Parry’s remarks at the inception of the Folk

Song Society, offer the notion that modern urban society was at the point of corrupting the last

vestiges of what they considered to be true folksong. That Vaughan Williams expressed similar

views is well documented. Most notably, he came to believe this before he really began his

111
Roy Harris, “History and Comparative Philology,” in Language and History: Integrationist Perspectives (New
York: Routledge, 2006), edited by Nigel Love, pp. 57-59. For further sources on the patterns and participants
concerning nineteenth-century philology, its manifestations, and its cultural politics, see Hannah Franziska
Augstein, James Cowles Prichard’s Anthropology: Remaking the Science of Man in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999); and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Roots, Races, and the Return to Philology,” in
Representations No. 106 (Spring, 2009), pp. 34-62.
112
Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival, Music and Society Series
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993), chapter 1, ff.

53
collecting, writing a letter to the Morning Post that urged the preservation of folksong.113 Even

decades later, Maud Karpeles, a close friend of Sharp and a participant in the English folk song

scene, was reaffirming the notion of a disappearing “living tradition” by writing that virtually all

authentic folksongs, which she distinguished along the familiar rural-urban lines discussed here,

were either lost or had already been collected long before.114

Vaughan Williams hinted at an awareness of the scholarly and cultural climate in which

he first collected folk songs when he claimed “no pretence to have any expert knowledge of

archaeology or antiquarianism, or folk-lore, or any of those subjects which an expert should

possess.” Rather, he writes, his authority on the topic stemmed from his experiencing folksong in

its natural environment and working among the more “primitive” peoples of England. 115 Still,

before he collected his first song, Vaughan Williams was showing himself in his writings on

folksong to share the national and cultural concerns not only of his friends and mentors in the

movement, but also larger currents that helped to shape all of their views. When Vaughan

Williams did finally collect folk songs, he could not help but to interpret his findings in light of

his cultural background even if, as Julian Onderdonk has shown, he was able to see past his

preconceptions at times. I have further argued here that Vaughan Williams’s writings, interests,

and other supporting facts suggest that the spirit and attitudes found in his favorite novel,

Lavengro, likely formed a part of those preconceptions even while they colored his early operatic

projects. The parallel is close if not exact. George Borrow’s protagonist discovers both himself

and the hidden lore of his geographical home through wandering and taking up philology.

Vaughan Williams also discovered part of himself through his seeking after folksong mostly in

113
The letter is quoted in its entirety in Kendall, “Through Bushes and Through Briars,” p. 62.
114
Maud Karpeles, An Introduction to English Folk Song (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 95-104.
115
Vaughan Williams, “English Folk-Songs,” quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, pp. 185-186.

54
rural regions. He argued later that it was a primary means for England, through its past musical

language, to find itself musically as well. It may be that Vaughan Williams did not go so far as to

consider himself a man after the protagonist of Lavengro, journeying into remote corners of the

English countryside, seeking after cultural treasures, substituting folk singers for gypsies (in a

few cases both were one and the same), and in so doing enacting a kind of musical philology in

the manner of Borrow. However, considering the similarities between Vaughan Williams’s

treatment of folksong as hidden knowledge brought to light, Borrow’s exaltation of Romany and

other languages as special lore, and the sharp resonance the latter had in a culture that prized the

search for origins, one might be pardoned for making the connection. It would be much more

difficult to claim that a passion on the part of Vaughan Williams for Lavengro, in many ways a

culturally emblematic work of its time, had absolutely nothing to do with his rural idealization of

folksong.

In conclusion, I reference the other remaining account provided by Ursula Vaughan

Williams in which she invokes Borrow’s name. She claims that in the years following the Great

War, Vaughan Williams resumed a favorite pastime when he embarked upon one of his

wayfaring trips in some of the counties of southern England, which as we shall see, had since

Elizabeth times become iconic of English pastoral landscape as a whole. She writes that he

stopped at a house for lodging and refreshment and found to his happy surprise that it was the

home of a fellow soldier in the war. The friends stayed up through much of the night in each

other’s company. If Ursula’s account of this meeting, with her sumptuous descriptions of the

rural country forming the backdrop of this journey, were not enough to make readers recall these

precise patterns in Lavengro’s adventures, she mentions at the end of the anecdote that “it was

55
still almost the world Borrow had known.”116 One wonders whether Vaughan Williams saw

these journeys in terms of his favorite novel, or described them as such to Ursula prior to the

latter relaying them in her book. In any case, if the event occurred as she described, it does

reinforce what his writings on folksong reveal – the fondness Vaughan Williams had for

journeys into the field, and his Borrowian delight at who and what he might discover there.

116
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 168.

56
 Chapter 3
Vaughan Williams, the Progressive Spirit, and the Pastoral Ode, ca. 1895-1914

The ways Vaughan Williams’s pre-Great War compositions intersect with the pastoral

mode are revealing. All too often the pastoral mode has been viewed as a merely backward-

looking means of expression, denoting a deeply conservative outlook on life on account of its use

of the myth of Arcadia and/or nostalgia for certain places and times. When one looks at the

period in which Vaughan Williams began composing his first mature works, one finds a situation

difficult to wholly reconcile with such an idea. At the very time when he was at his most

progressive politically, and looking forward in terms of his career, he composed pastoral works

most closely aligned with the idyllic, Arcadian aspects predominantly associated with the mode.

Several studies have addressed Vaughan Williams’s political leanings and how these

relate to his musical activities. Among the most successful are found in studies by Alain Frogley

and Julian Onderdonk.117 These are especially adept at resisting the urge to place upon Vaughan

Williams an easy label without qualification or sensitivity to which of the composer’s attitudes

changed over time and which remained fairly consistent throughout his life. Onderdonk’s study

is particularly thorough in its explication of the composer’s sensibilities, showing how the more

leftist of Vaughan Williams’s impulses were genuine but often checked by a number of

moderating influences accrued since his youth in the Wedgwood estate.118

My task in this chapter will not be merely to revisit Vaughan Williams’s politics. Rather,

I am interested in how three currents both relate to and stand distinct from each other. First, I will

recount how much the political and social climate in pre-war England provided a conducive

117
See Frogley, “Constructing Englishness in music: National Character and the Reception of Ralph Vaughan
Williams,” in Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies, pp. 1-22.
118
See Onderdonk, “Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Folksong Collecting: English Nationalism and the Rise of Professional
Society,” chapters 1-2.

57
backdrop for the flowering of the pastoral mode in new uses and contexts. Second, I will address

the extent to which Vaughan Williams personally participated in and/or subscribed to the values

and cultural activities of this atmosphere, focusing in part upon his reaction to the influential

ideas of William Morris. Third, I will examine Vaughan Williams’s pre-war pastoral

compositions in light of the first two currents, determining where there are demonstrable points

of contact and where Vaughan Williams took his musical art in more individual directions. At

the end of these examinations, I will argue that Vaughan Williams’s pastoral music largely takes

on the dimensions of odes during the first part of his career. Here is Vaughan Williams’s

pastoralism at its most optimistic, supported by his own personal experiences and eager outlook

at the time.

As outlined in several sources, the political climate of late nineteenth- and early

twentieth- century England provided fertile soil for a cultural re-flourishing of pastoral

sentiment. As more people resettled to towns, cities grew and new problems confronted

society.119 The pollution, squalor, and other ill effects that resulted from the unprecedented size

and populations of cities such as London and Manchester alarmed many and produced some

distinct reactions. There was an increasing sense that rural living was healthier and more natural

than sacrificing one’s health and dignity to enable others to pursue urban capitalist ventures.

Industrialization fostered nostalgia for rural England that was not always reactionary in nature.

An idealized rural England rooted in a mythic past was also something of a blueprint for a

119
Peter Mandler points out that, by 1851, the nation was predominantly urban in terms of population. See
Mandler, The Rise and Fall of the Stately Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 72. This being said, it is
also true, as both Eric Hobsbawm and Dorothy De Val write, that England was still largely a rural nation in the
nineteenth century and after in terms of land area. See Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial
Revolution (New York: The New Press, 1999), edited by Chris Wrigley, p. 173; and De Val, “The Imagined Village,”
pp. 342-343.

58
desired future return to balance. As such, the preservation of rural England and its embodiment

of ideal living and national character began to take on progressive connotations in unique ways.

A renewed love for things rural that at this time became fashionable, and which led to changes in

legislation, might almost be considered a kind of proto-environmentalism, all the more as it was

pitted against the ever-larger, dirtier mills and factories that the industrial revolution had brought

about in metropolitan areas.120

In this climate a number of writers emerged who mixed various brands of socialist

politics with literary expression. Many belonged to the middle or upper classes and viewed their

subjects from a standpoint above material want. Perhaps the most visible of these was William

Morris (1834-1896), whose paintings, crafts, and textiles spurred a cultural movement in the late

nineteenth century.121 All of these reflect in some measure Morris’s belief in a natural and

unfettered mode of living. His writings, which encompass a wide range of genres from poetry to

fantasy novels, also reinforce this idea. One major work to this effect is News from Nowhere

(1890), a treatise on Utopia in the form of a futuristic fantasy novel. It proceeds in the first

person as the story of a middle-aged man, William Guest, who wakes one day to suddenly find

himself in an England set many years in the future – 1952. Guest discovers a lushly pastoral

120
For a detailed treatment of all of these trends, see Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the
Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially chapters 4-5; Jan
Marsh, Back to the Land (London: Quartet Books, 1982); and The Victorian Countryside, 2 Volumes (London,
Boston, and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), edited by G.E. Mingay. Wiener makes the important point
that multiple sides of the political spectrum seized upon pastoral politics around the turn of the century, not
progressives only. (See Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, chapter 4.) In light of this,
the fact that Vaughan Williams’s progressivism was moderated by a traditionalist streak is not surprising when
viewing his life and work in the context of this culture. See also Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home,
chapters 1 and 2, for a discussion of how the English country home as a cultural icon relates to these trends.
121
One of the principal biographic volumes on Morris is still E.P. Thompson’s William Morris: From Romantic to
Revolutionary, first published in 1955 by Stanford University Press and reissued in subsequent printings, including
one in 2011. Thompson’s book is particularly insightful in how it traces Morris’s development as a writer and
socialist thinker. For further information, see Roderick Marshall, William Morris and his Earthly Paradises (Tisbury,
UK: The Compton Press, 1979); and Florence S. Boos and Caroline G. Silver, Socialism and the Literary Artistry of
William Morris (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990).

59
Utopia in which the industrialized, unattractive portions of London have disappeared, where

dwellings and clothing reflect the belief in beauty for its own sake, where people live in harmony

with one another and work only for pleasure, and where money and personal ownership have

been abolished in favor of a perfected communal society. Many chapters in the center of the

novel take the form of Hammond, an old man, telling Guest how these changes came about from

the late nineteenth century. They actually represent, under the guise of fiction, a kind of social

and political manifesto of William Morris. Indeed, in the last words of the novel, Guest wakes

and muses on this future vision, hinting at its suitability as a blueprint for actual social change.

There are some significant assumptions informing Morris’s work that characterize certain

progressive systems of thought in the era in which News from Nowhere appeared. First, Morris

clearly favors elements of the distant past in terms of both the Arcadian world he paints and the

regressive, indeed medieval, stage of technology he portrays as ideal in this novel. If Morris was

not anti-technology through and through, he was surely against pervasive mechanical industry.

Morris was, after all, also affiliated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement popular in nineteenth-

century England. This movement favored among other things a return to principles of

Renaissance painting that extolled the natural in manner and bearing. Yet as with the Pre-

Raphaelites, Morris’s vision extends past merely idealizing elements of a former age. He

suggests in News from Nowhere that the social and natural harmony of a mythic past could

become a reality if present society aspired to the proper socialist blueprint. Like many

progressives of the time, Morris believed that Utopia could be achieved if mankind overcame

present encumbering difficulties. This point is, I believe, important. In his study on pastoral,

Terry Gifford, while at pains to demonstrate the centrality of the Arcadian myth to the pastoral

ethos, downplays the fact that Morris’s Arcadia is in the future while most Arcadias are set in a

60
past golden age. He writes that News From Nowhere “conforms to any definition of the pastoral”

in terms of its “neo-medievalism” and its recognizable Arcadia regardless of the time in

question.122 While this is true enough, the distinction is significant. As a progressive humanist,

Morris positions his Utopian pastoral paradise in the future out of a fundamental belief that

human society could be perfected under the right conditions. This is very different from the role

that Arcadia occupies in the Christian Scriptures, where, for example, the Eden of the remote

past was the only earthly Arcadia that ever existed, and the only chance at an ideal future

paradise lies in heaven. One of Jesus Christ’s chief tenets was, after all: “My Kingdom is not of

this world.”123

Morris was not alone in aligning an idealized pastoral world with a future Utopia. Other

writers such as John Ruskin (1819-1900) and Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) took up this theme

in their own ways.124 Nor was this notion entirely without precedent in older pastoral literature.

Writing almost two millennia earlier, the Roman poet Virgil offered in his Eclogues ideas that,

though different in setting and precise aim, anticipate some sentiments of the progressive

pastoralists in late Victorian England. In two of these poems, Virgil aligns the pastoral mode

with present political unrest and predicts a future era marked by balance in politics and nature.

The very first Eclogue features shepherds who speak among other matters of the policy of

enclosure threatening their way of life. The fourth Eclogue is the most unique and most

discussed of the ten. It takes as its theme the anticipation of a new leader yet to be born who is
122
Gifford, Pastoral, pp. 36-39.
123
King James Bible, John 18:36.
124
Jan Marsh sees Carpenter, Morris, and Ruskin as the three whose writers proved to be the most influential in
the Back-to-the-Land Movement. See Marsh, Back to the Land, pp. 8ff. Ruskin’s work remains much read and cited
today. He outlined many of his own distinct ideas in Unto This Last (a series of four essays originally appearing in
Cornhill Magazine in 1860 and published as a book in 1862), and Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and
Labourers of Great Britain (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968 [a reprint of the 1886 edition]). Vaughan Williams
suggested that he was familiar with the works of Ruskin (whether with these particular titles or not is unclear) in
his correspondence to Harold Child concerning what would become the opera Hugh the Drover. I will discuss this
opera later in the chapter. See Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 406.

61
destined to usher in an era of harmony and prosperity. The copious pastoral metaphors of the

poem help to position its new social age to coincide with an accompanying natural harmony also

to be realized. The fourth Eclogue stands apart as the only one of the ten not obviously indebted

to Theocritus’s Idylls. It forms perhaps the principal precedent for the pastoral embodying a

mythical future paradise.125

Vaughan Williams was well acquainted with the writings of both Morris and Virgil.126

His few comments on Morris serve to illustrate something referenced in Chapter 1 – that he

could acknowledge a liking for, and even an influence from, certain authors while remaining

ambivalent toward their works. In the case of Morris, Vaughan Williams offers comments in

multiple writings. In one cited in the last chapter, he recalls how during his youth his aunt was a

fervent follower of the Morris movement. This formed some of the composer’s earliest

impressions.

That must have been in the early eighties when I was about
10. I used to go with my family every Christmas to stop
with an Aunt. My Aunt had been much bitten by the
William Morris movement. She frescoed sunflowers on her
walls and put bottled glass in her windows. One of the by-
products of this movement was the cult of the Christmas
carol. My Aunt was a first-rate musician and her children
were also musical and we used to gather round the
pianoforte in the evening and sing ‘Stainer and Bell’. I
especially remember the ‘Cherry Tree’ carol tune which
has remained a fragrant possession all my life and is, to my
mind, much more beautiful than later discoveries to the
same words.127

125
A good starting place for more information on Virgil’s Eclogues is Wendell Clausen, A Commentary on Virgil
Eclogues (Clarendon Press, 1995).
126
Vaughan Williams indicated that he was familiar with Virgil’s poetry in a letter to Ursula Wood postmarked 16
Oct 1941. In the course of praising some of Ursula’s poetry, Vaughan Williams fondly references Virgil. See Cobbe,
ed., Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, p. 325.
127
Vaughan Williams, “Let Us Remember…Early Days,” quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, pg.
251.

62
Other allusions to Morris are even more instructive. In the course of offering tributes to his late

friend and colleague, Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams mentions how the deceased composer

was an impassioned Socialist and follower of Morris’s political philosophy, though his

enthusiasm for certain points later waned. In making these remarks, Vaughan Williams shares

his own value judgments about Morris. The first example is from an introductory talk given on

the occasion of a Holst Memorial Concert that took place on June 22, 1934.

While [Holst] was still young, he was strongly attracted by

the ideals of William Morris and, though in later years he
discarded the medievalism of that teacher, the ideal of
comradeship remained with him throughout his life.128

The second example comes from an essay on Holst, apparently penned earlier in the same year

and while Holst was still alive. It is an obvious variation upon the sentiments presented in the

first excerpt, though it provides some important complementary details.

It was Holst’s strong sense of human sympathy which

brought him when a young man into contact with William
Morris and the Kelmscott Club. The tawdriness of London,
its unfriendliness, the sordidness both of its riches and
poverty were overwhelming to an enthusiastic and sensitive
youth; and to him the ideals of Morris, the insistence on
beauty in every detail of human life and work, were a
revelation. No wonder then that the poetic socialism of the
Kelmscott Club became the natural medium of his
aspirations; to Morris and his followers ‘comradeship’ was
no pose but an absolute necessity of life. And though as
years go on Holst has grown out of the weak points in
Morris’s teaching, yet his ideal of thoroughness, of beauty
and above all comradeship have remained and grow
stronger. It is this almost mystical sense of unity which is
the secret of Holst’s power as a teacher.129

From these excerpts, which together represent Vaughan Williams’s fullest discourse on Morris

presently available, one learns several useful things about his approach to certain contemporary

128
Vaughan Williams, “Introductory Talk to Holst Memorial Concert,” quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams
on Music, pg. 300.
129
Vaughan Williams, “Gustav Holst: An Essay and a Note,” in National Music and Other Essays, p. 135.

63
social ideas. First, he clearly relays that the exultation of brotherhood and beauty in life and art

were the things that for him (and not for Holst only) held particular value in Morris’s teachings.

Second, the ambivalence that he showed toward several ideas and creeds in his life extended to

Morris and his teachings as well. It is true that the remarks cited here all date from well after the

first decade of the twentieth century and so could represent views that Vaughan Williams only

later came to fully adopt. However, I have found no other information that proves beyond doubt

that he emulated Morris as outwardly and enthusiastically as Holst once had.130 It is known that

the young Holst was more politically active.131

It is difficult to deny, however, that Vaughan Williams’s writings and activities before

the war he were very much in alignment with the celebration of beauty in life, art, and the natural

world in a manner close to that espoused by Morris. In the first chapter I quoted a letter from

him to his cousin Ralph Wedgwood that fervently professes a love for the natural scenery of

southern England, where he spent much of his childhood. In the preceding excerpts, there is the

enthusiasm with which he relays Holst’s faith in the idea of communal brotherhood, further

showing that he had shared this value with him. Finally, there is the fact that Vaughan Williams,

like Morris, subscribed to Fabian Socialism, a political movement that valued gradual rather than

revolutionary change and reforms through peaceful means.132 However, it is also true that

Vaughan Williams later, and in private communication, expressed a great deal of ambivalence

toward his earlier political associations. He was, as Paul Harrington points out, likely never more

130
For example, the slow movement of Holst’s Cotswolds Symphony (1899-1900) is an elegy subtitled “In
Memoriam William Morris.”
131
Holst, for example, joined the Hammersmith Socialist Club in 1896 and became conductor of its choir. For more
information on Holst’s political and cultural activities and views, see Christopher M. Scheer, “Fin-de-siecle Britain:
Imperalism and Wagner in the Music of Gustav Holst,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2007), chapters
1-2. While Vaughan Williams read Fabian tracts and discussed politics during gatherings with friends and fellow
students, he never became an active member of a political organization.
132
For more information on the movement, its formation, and its activities, see Edward R. Pease, The History of the
Fabian Society (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1916).

64
than a Fabian Socialist in the larger sense. The available information suggests that Vaughan

Williams embraced the idea of comradeship but stopped short of wholeheartedly subscribing to

elaborate social theories.133

Perhaps the clearest indicators of Vaughan Williams’s affinity with the ideas of Morris

and others in the progressive cultural climate of late Victorian and Edwardian England are his

choices as a composer, both in terms of the themes and texts he handled. These may be classified

according to two broad categories of compositions, both of which involve the pastoral mode. The

first category comprises compositions that celebrate the evocative qualities of some natural

landscape. The second group connects with the pastoral mode in the more vague, metaphysical

sense of exploring beyond horizons or attaining a new state of being. This second category

reflects Vaughan Williams’s newfound discovery, at the hands of Bertrand Russell, of the poetry

of Walt Whitman, though compositions with non-Whitman texts appear at this time and share

these characteristics. Both categories unite under the more generalized rubric of the ode. While

the ode may not have as sharply defined a tradition in pastoral art and literature as the elegy or

the allegory (both discussed in later chapters), it runs through the literature that Vaughan

Williams chose to set to music prior to the Great War. In this music he conformed more closely

than at any other point in his career to the Arcadian ideal. Never again would he so consistently

embrace an almost unmediated optimism. He did so through one group of compositions that

predominantly celebrate the past and the present, and another group that looks with eager

anticipation ahead and beyond.

For the first category, the obvious place to begin is with those orchestral compositions

that bear scenic titles but present no set texts. Several of these take the form of tributes to various

133
Harrington, “Holst and Vaughan Williams: Radical Pastoral,” in Music and the Politics of Culture (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1989), edited by Christopher Norris, pp. 124-125.

65
regions that Vaughan Williams knew or visited in his travels. These include In the Fen Country

(1904), the Norfolk Rhapsodies (1906), and, for reasons that will shortly be made clear, the

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) (also commonly known as the Tallis Fantasia).

Along with some “orchestral impressions” dating from between 1903 and 1907, the first two

belong to a group of early orchestral works that represent Vaughan Williams’s first mature

efforts as a composer. 134 Several coincide with his earliest experiences of collecting folk

songs.135 The titles of the compositions, some of which were never completed, allude to scenic

locales mostly in the southern portions of England. Vaughan Williams either lived near to them

at certain times or encountered them in his leisurely travels and folk song collecting expeditions

(the Solent between the English mainland and the Isle of Wight, the “Fen Country” of East

Anglia not far from Cambridge, etc.). Although poetry or inscriptions of a pastoral bent

supplement the titles of more than one of these works, the selection of localities to use as

inspiration must have also been guided by personal experience. The inclusion in this group of the

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis merits some explanation. While it bears no explicit

associations with pastoral themes, certain considerations may link it in a roundabout way with

English landscape. Alun Howkins describes how the revival of Tudor music and culture in the

late nineteenth century was closely related to the pastoralism of the era, and that the South

embodied what many saw as the most ideal manifestation of rural England. Additionally, he

points out how “Tudor England and the countryside were to be brought together as a new basis

134
Two of these orchestral impressions have formed the center of previous discussions due to their appearance in
other compositions. See Andrew Herbert, “Unfinished Business: The Evolution of the “solent” theme,” in Foreman,
ed., Vaughan Williams in Perspective, pp. 69-83. See also Savage, “Vaughan Williams, the Romany Ryes, and the
Cambridge Ritualists,” p. 414. In the latter piece, Savage mentions the opening theme of the first impression –
Harnham Down – in connection with the much later An Oxford Elegy. This composition forms the main discussion
of Chapter 5.
135
Michael Vaillancourt discusses this matter in a chapter on Vaughan Williams’s earliest orchestral music. See
Vaillaincourt, “Coming of Age: the Earliest Orchestral Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams,” in Frogley, ed., Vaughan
Williams Studies, pp. 23-46, and especially 36-38.

66
for an English national music.”136 Other commentators have linked some of the Tallis Fantasia’s

gestures and themes with the folksong idiom.137 Vaughan Williams himself explored the

relationship between church tunes and folk songs in the last of the written-out lectures of

National Music.138 However, he did not leave behind any clear indication that he in any way

connected with folksong Tallis’s modal psalm tune that forms the basis of his fantasia. Following

from the discussion in Chapter 1, even if he had at all associated the Tallis Fantasia with

folksong, that would not by itself establish for the work clear pastoral credentials. It is only a

possibility that Vaughan Williams had pastoral imagery directly in mind concerning this music,

but he certainly draws upon a past Tudor age widely associated with iconic English landscapes.

Another early orchestral work that merits special mention here is one that, given long

unavailability of a recording or published score, has received very little attention in the

secondary literature – the Bucolic Suite (1900).139 This is one of Vaughan Williams’s earliest

surviving, complete orchestral compositions. It is one of a few works in his whole oeuvre that

makes use in its title of either the term “pastoral” or a close synonym. In the first chapter I

discussed how Vaughan Williams only infrequently makes unmistakable reference to musical

pastoral topics of the Western European tradition. The Bucolic Suite may be another exception to

this pattern. Laid out in four movements, it contains gestures resembling widely recognizable

136
Alun Howkins, “The Discovery of Rural England,” in, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920 (London: Croon
Helm, 1987), edited by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, pp. 62-68, 72.
137
For example, see Pople, “Vaughan Williams, Tallis, and the Phantasy Principle,” in Frogley, ed., Vaughan
Williams Essays, pp. 47-80; and Mellers, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion, pp. 47-58. A recent article in
the popular press also addresses the Tallis Fantasia as it may relate to folk and Tudor elements. See Rob Young,
“Cloud of knowing,” in The Guardian, 11 June 2010.
138
Vaughan Williams, “The Influence of Folk-Song on the Music of the Church,” in National Music and Other
Essays, pp. 74-82.
139
My conclusions on the Bucolic Suite are preliminary and based upon secondary sources, particularly Michael
Kennedy’s A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Michael Vaillancourt’s essay “Coming of Age:
The Earliest Orchestral Music,” found on pp. 23-46 of Frogley’s Vaughan Williams Studies and cited in multiple
earlier instances. The manuscript for this score resides at the British Library under the shelfmark Add. MS 57275. A
published edition is due out from Oxford University Press in the near future.

67
musical pastoral topics, including: dance-like meters in 6/8 or 3/4, lilting melodies above pedal

points or similar bass patterns, and the use of high woodwinds such as flutes and oboes to play

such melodies. Like the Concerto for Oboe and Strings, the Bucolic Suite may indeed concede

something to conventional pastoral topics. As with case of the Oboe Concerto, however, certain

circumstances complicate such a label. One early review written by Edwin Evans and quoted in

Kennedy’s life-and-works volume, presents an interesting take on the nature of its pastoralism:

“the principal movements are rather more genuinely reminiscent of the countryside than pastoral

music is apt to be. This is not the pastoral music of silk-clad shepherds and shepherdesses, but

rather of brawny clodhoppers in corduroys…the key-note of the work is essentially the real

country merry-making as opposed to that of ladies and gentlemen indulging in a passing fancy in

the country.”140 If such remarks reflect Vaughan Williams’s own conception of the work, then

any nod to traditional pastoral art may be limited or non-existent. Written during a time when

Vaughan Williams was first formulating his ideas on folksong (and before he collected any), he

may have had in mind, as Evans suggests, the lives of folk singers rather than the lofty figures of

Arcadian literature and opera. In this scenario, Vaughan Williams may have employed musical

pastoral topics used since the early Baroque period as a stand-in due to an under-developed or

idealized conception of actual folksong. In either case it is difficult, by reason of title and

musical character, not to believe that the Bucolic Suite is some sort of rural idealization. There is

little or no “hard pastoral” here.

140
Edwin Evans, from an article in the Musical Standard (July 25, 1903), quoted in Kennedy, The Works of Ralph
Vaughan Williams, pp. 55-56. Evans (1874-1945) was an English music critic and promoter who wrote for several
publications during his career. He is known for his advocacy of Debussy, his program notes for concerts of
contemporary English composers, and his contributions to the Grove Dictionary among other things. Vaughan
Williams corresponded with Evans as early as 1903. See Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958,
pp. 43-44, 183-184.

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 The other major subset of pastoral music in our first category includes the relatively large

number of art songs Vaughan Williams produced around the earliest years of the twentieth

century. Like much of the music composed before the Great War, and especially prior to his

study with Ravel in 1908, these songs owe a great deal to Romantic Lied conventions of the

nineteenth century. Many of them emphasize natural scenes or emotions connected with such

scenes. Below is a table containing all of the explicitly pastoral-themed compositions that

Vaughan Williams completed prior to 1914, excepting his many arrangements of folk songs.

Notice the predominance of the song genre.

Table 3.1

Pre-1914 Compositions by Vaughan Williams Years

with Explicit Pastoral/Natural Themes Completed
(Excluding Arrangements)141
Echo’s Lament of Narcissus (Madrigal for Choir, 1895-1896
text by Jonson)
The Splendour Falls (Song, text by Tennyson) Abt. 1896
How Can the Tree but Whither? (Song, text by 1898
Vaux)
Claribel (Song, text by Tennyson) 1898
The Garden of Prosperine (Choir and Orchestra, 1899
text by Swinburne)
Bucolic Suite (Orchestra) 1900
Linden Lea (Song, text by Barnes) 1901
Blackmwore by the Stour (Song, text by Barnes) 1902
Tears, Idle Tears (Song, text by Tennyson) 1902
When I am Dead, My Dearest (Song, text by C. Abt. 1903
Rossetti)
The Winter’s Willow (Song, text by Barnes) Abt. 1903
Silent Noon (Song, text by D.G. Rossetti) 1903
Willow-Wood (Song, later Cantata for baritone and 1903, 1909
orchestra; text by D.G. Rossetti)
Sound Sleep (Song, text by C. Rossetti) 1903

141
I am also excluding incidental music that Vaughan Williams composed for several plays before 1914. Although
some plays he worked with contain clear pastoral references and settings (for example, Gilbert Murray’s
translation of Euripedes’s Iphigenia in Tauris, for which Vaughan Williams provided music in 1911), I am uncertain
in multiple cases as to which portions he set or how he set them.

69
Table 3.1 (cont.)

Orpheus With His Lute (Song, text by 1903

Shakespeare)
In the Fen Country (Orchestra) 1904
The House of Life (Song Cycle inc. Silent Noon, 1904
texts by D.G. Rossetti)
Songs of Travel (Song Cycle, texts by R.L. 1904
Stevenson)
Dreamland (Song, text by C. Rossetti) 1904
Orchestral Impressions (Harnham Down and The 1904-1907
Solent completed)
Pan’s Anniversary (Incidental Music for Jonson’s 1905
Masque, produced in collaboration with Gustav
Holst)
Norfolk Rhapsodies 1-3 (Only No. 1 survives) 1906
Toward the Unknown Region (Song for chorus and 1907
orchestra, text by Whitman)
The Sky Above the Roof (Song, text by Verlaine) 1908
On Wenlock Edge (Song Cycle, texts by A.E. 1909
Housman)
A Sea Symphony (Soloists, Chorus, Orchestra, 1909
texts by Whitman)
Romance and Pastoral for Violin and Piano Before
1914
The Lark Ascending (Romance for Violin and 1914
Orchestra or Violin and Piano, after a poem by (Revised
George Meredith) 1920)
Hugh the Drover (Opera in Two Acts, libretto by 1914
Harold Child) (Revised
afterward)

It is fitting in several respects to begin examining this largely pastoral song repertoire by

first considering a single song – Linden Lea. This happens to have been Vaughan Williams’s first

published composition (appearing in 1902 in the magazine The Vocalist, where he also published

multiple articles) and has received frequent performances. It was written when his interest in

country music and local traditions were reaching a high intensity. The text is by William Barnes

and showcases the poet’s penchant for writing in the Dorset dialect, as well as his tendency to

70
glorify rural life.142 Vaughan Williams retained enthusiasm for Barnes’s poetry throughout his

life, as is evidenced by his return to it for the 1952 song “In the Spring” (dedicated to Barnes)

and by the fact that it was a highlight of his initial acquaintance with his future second wife

Ursula Wood in 1938.143 Linden Lea uses a simple strophic tune, matching well the text’s gentle

descriptions of its rural scene. Two factors are of particular interest. First, the published score

offers texts that preserve Barnes’s Dorset dialect poetry in addition to a standard English version

of the words. (For convenience, I have placed both versions of the text in Appendix B.) Second,

the poetry itself presents an interesting and perhaps revealing choice by the composer. The third

verse begins: “Let other folk make money faster in the air of dark-roomed towns; I don’t dread a

peevish master, though no man may heed my frowns.” In a poem otherwise glorifying nature,

Barnes, a man whose life and poetry presents a very traditional and religious outlook, includes a

dig at capitalist venture. Vaughan Williams in turn chose the poem as the subject of his first

musical publication. In Chapter 2 I discussed how, in connection with folksong, Hubert Parry

denigrated urban capitalism in favor of what he considered to be the rural folks’ way of life.

Vaughan Williams, though not as outspoken against urban financial venture, similarly idealized

rural folk. In setting this Barnes text, how much did he personally subscribe to its most Morris-

like sentiments? How much did the words mean to him and his fast-growing involvement with

folksong?

Also prominent among Vaughan Williams’s early songs are those set to texts by the Pre-

Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). There are two principal works

using Rossetti’s texts. The first is the song cycle The House of Life (1904), the second number of

142
More information on William Barnes and his place in Victorian literature may be found in R.A. Forsyth, “The
Conserving Myth of William Barnes,” in Victorian Studies Vol. 6, No. 4 (June, 1963), pp. 325-354. The article
discusses among other things Barnes’s philological activity, particularly his attempts to preserve the Dorset dialect.
143
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 219.

71
which – “Silent Noon” – was composed first, has achieved a separate popularity outside of the

cycle, and virtually epitomizes Vaughan Williams’s nature settings from around this time.144 The

other work is the cantata Willow Wood, began in 1902 and finished in 1903 as a setting of some

Rossetti sonnets, and scored for violin, piano, and voice. Vaughan Williams recast it, in the

version most known today, for low voice, female chorus, and orchestra in 1908-1909. Kennedy

writes that this cantata shares a musical theme (he does not specify which) with The House of

Life, both having been written around the same time. Perhaps he is referring to a descending

melodic idea in the initial song, “Love-Sight,” found beginning six measures in, which parallels

with the harmonically elastic, recurring main theme in Willow Wood.

Ex. 3.1: Vaughan Williams, The House of Life – “Love-Sight,” mm. 1-13 (particularly 6-11)

144
Michael Kennedy’s The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams lists “Silent Noon” as composed in 1903 and the cycle
The House of Life as completed in 1904. (See pp. 407-408.)

72
Ex. 3.2: Vaughan Williams, Willow-Wood, mm. 5-8 (particularly 7-8)

Ex. 3.3: Vaughan Williams, Willow-Wood, mm. 242-243

This theme, as one finds it in Willow Wood, is worth remark in that it demonstrates how already

at an early stage Vaughan Williams was developing musical fingerprints that he would exploit to

versatile effects. It finds a definite echo in another early, more overtly pastoral song. Compare

the previous examples to the opening accompaniment theme of “The Sky Above the Roof”

(1909), its lyrics adapted from Paul Verlaine’s French text by Mabel Dearmer.145

145
Mabel Dearmer was a writer and wife of the Anglican clergyman Percy Dearmer, who Vaughan Williams worked
with when he edited The English Hymnal between 1904 and 1906. Vaughan Williams recounts working with Percy

73
Ex. 3.4: Vaughan Williams, “The Sky Above the Roof”, mm. 1-4

The text of Willow Wood uses natural imagery in the course of recounting a meeting

between the narrator and “Love” as a transcendent entity. Love then shows the narrator a vision

of his deceased wife, reuniting the two in a brief, bittersweet quasi-dream. In his musical setting

of the Willow Wood sonnets, Vaughan Williams sets melodies that seem to accentuate the

atmospheric qualities of the verses at least as much as they do the narrative. Stephen Banfield

writes that Vaughan Williams’s setting does not always capture these sadder aspects of the text,

suggesting that his lack of occasion to personally identify with the death of a spouse (at least

early in his career) limits his setting.146 Vaughan Williams’s music in Willow Wood, in other

words, seems to emphasize the beautiful and transcendent at the expense of the tragic. On the

other hand, Banfield finds Vaughan Williams more successful in addressing the theme of death

in the House of Life cycle.147 But even here, one may argue that he brings out the sadder aspects

primarily to paint a scene rather than share in any personal way with the poet’s angst. In setting

this other Rossetti text, Vaughan Williams succeeds similarly on the level of accentuating the

languorous and Edenesque atmospheres that they suggest. In the case of “Silent Noon,” for

Dearmer in “Some Reminisces of the English Hymnal,” part of a collection entitled The First Fifty Years: A Brief
Account of the English Hymnal from 1906 to 1956 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 2-5. Quoted in
Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, pp. 115-118.
146 th
Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20 Century Volume 2 (Cambridge
University Press, 1985), pp. 78-79. Vaughan Williams’s first wife, Adeline Fisher, died in 1951 after years of physical
illness.
147
Ibid.

74
example, the breeze of the summer afternoon, together with fingers in the leaves of grass

described by the text, receives treatment in the initial lilting theme in the piano. In the middle

section, a series of treble chords above ascending arpeggios in the bass sets the scene for text’s

mention of the flowers that stretch out on the ground beyond where the lovers lie in the grass.

Ex. 3.5: Vaughan Williams, “Silent Noon” (beginning of middle section)

The cycle Songs of Travel (1904), using texts by Robert Louis Stevenson, exemplifies

many of the concepts that attach to Vaughan Williams’s early pastoral music, including the

wandering life, natural beauty, and romantic love. Although, as Trevor Hold points out, the

Songs of Travel are less sensual and of a more “open air” quality than the Rossetti settings, they

nonetheless share a few topical similarities.148 The second number in particular, “Let beauty

Awake,” is another emblematic work that could accurately represent the tone of the early period

pastoral music. The text in the excerpt below paints a decidedly pastoral scene, brought out by

the undulating arpeggios in the piano accompaniment

148
Hold, Parry to Finzi: Twenty English Song Composers (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2002), p. 109.

75
Ex. 3.6: Vaughan Williams, Songs of Travel – “Let Beauty Awake,” mm. 4-11

This cycle is an early case in which Vaughan Williams chose and ordered individual poems from

a much larger collection of texts, as he would do repeatedly with other works throughout his

career. The songs in Vaughan Williams’s ordering begin by extolling the wandering life (as in

“The Vagabond”) before exploring contrasting moods in the following songs. They conclude

with the valedictory “I have trod the upward and downward slope.” Multiple commentators have

76
linked this cycle to German Romantic predecents by composers such as Franz Schubert. Michael

Kennedy particularly mentions Winterreise in connection with Songs of Travel and wrote that the

latter shares the quality of its wanderer-narrator being ready to face whatever may meet him.149

Another biographer, James Day, remarks upon the difference between the Romantic angst of

Schubert’s protagonist versus the hardier, more upbeat wanderer of Vaughan Williams’s

group.150 Rufus Hallmark discusses the wanderer-infused literature that Vaughan Williams

loved, including Borrow’s Lavengro and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, as well as the

favored rural walks of the composer, in connection with Songs of Travel.151 In all of these views

the idea of optimistic steadfastness at what awaits emerges as a dominant theme. Kennedy even

remarks: “In Stevenson’s virile open-air verses Vaughan Williams found a half-way stage to

Whitman.”152 It is tempting, as others have suggested, to view this cycle metaphorically in terms

of Vaughan Williams’s life and career. In a sense this would prove to be his “setting out” work,

arguably his first truly successful and enduring composition of extended length.

Now I will turn to other, larger-scale, vocal works belonging to the first category of early

pastoral music by Vaughan Williams. The first that deserves special consideration is another

song cycle – On Wenlock Edge (1909), scored for tenor, string quartet, and piano. Here one

immediately revisits a similar pattern to that discussed in connection with Willow Wood and the

solo-piano songs. In what may at first glance seem to be an obvious exception to the rule of

optimistic, often Arcadian works forming the bulk of Vaughan Williams pre-war pastoral music,

149
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 8.
150
James Day, Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 112.
151
Rufus Hallmark, “Robert Louis Stevenson and Songs of Travel,” in Adams and Wells, eds., Vaughan Williams
Essays, pp. 133-135. Hallmark’s essay also meticulously describes the inception of Songs of Travel, including the
process wherein Vaughan Williams chose and reordered Stevenson’s verse. (See pp. 129-132.)
152
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 80.

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this well-loved song group for tenor, piano and string quartet (based upon poems by A.E.

Housman) has been consistently held up by early commentators as failing to match the “Death in

Arcadia” themes of its texts. Michael Kennedy’s discussion of the work cites an early pair of

reviews by Ernest Newman that criticize it on multiple grounds, most notably on the account of

its privileging pictorial qualities at the expense of the poetry’s drama.153 Even positive

assessments of On Wenlock Edge have spoken of its scene-setting qualities. Simona Pakenham

writes that in the last song – “Clun” – “Vaughan Williams conjures up a picture of those sleepy

West Country villages” and “quite overpowers the somber Housman,” though she admittedly

does describe certain songs in the cycle as “dramatic.”154 A.E.F. Dickinson considers the cycle to

be one of “vignettes.”155 Hubert Foss and Wilfrid Mellers, for two other examples, also write of

the work largely in scenic terms.156 It is also worth mentioning in light of this reception trend that

On Wenlock Edge is one of the major examples where Vaughan Williams made clear choices

concerning what to include and, perhaps more notably, what not to include in the way of texts.

Over Housman’s express wish that none of A Shropshire Lad (the collection from which On

Wenlock Edge draws its texts) be set to music, Vaughan Williams picked just six poems that

were suitable for his purposes. In one case, true to lifelong habit, he omitted words he did not

like. The third song, “Is my team ploughing?” is an abridgement of Housman’s poem.

Commenting upon the discarded lines, Vaughan Williams wrote to Hubert Foss: “I also feel that

a poet should be grateful to anyone who fails to perpetuate such lines as: -

153
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 116. Newman’s remarks are contained in a review from the
Sunday Times dated 29 October, 1922, and in a longer, earlier review article entitled “Concerning ‘A Shropshire
Lad’ and Other Matters,” in The Musical Times Vol. 59, No. 907 (Sep. 1, 1918), pp. 393-398. Newman’s Musical
Times article criticizes On Wenlock Edge not only on the account of its pictorial emphasis but also because of a
perceived lack of sensitivity toward the text’s rhythms.
154
Pakenham, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Discovery of His Music (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1957), pp. 36-37.
155
A.E.F. Dickinson, Vaughan Williams (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 161.
156
See Hubert Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 100-105; and
Mellers, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion, pp. 32-42.

78
‘The goal stands up, the Keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.’”157

In his short autobiographical sketch, Vaughan Williams mentions that On Wenlock Edge was one

of the first works he composed upon returning to England from his study with Ravel in Paris in

the early months of 1908. He describes himself as smitten with a case of “French fever,” citing

the work as “a song cycle with several atmospheric effects.”158 This seems to reinforce the

consensus just described. Ursula Vaughan Williams adds in her volume, “Housman’s clear-cut

poems with their nostalgic and vivid emotion were often set to music.”159

Such patterns are similarly discernable in Vaughan Williams’s first completed opera and

the only one started before the Great War that would eventually be finished. Hugh the Drover

grew largely out of Vaughan Williams’s involvement with folksong. The opera’s libretto follows

the fortunes of a Cotswold woman (Mary) as she chooses a wandering stranger (Hugh) over an

overbearing town butcher. Considered as a whole, the work revels in the kind of scene-setting

and glorification of the wandering life encountered in the Songs of Travel and other compositions

of the composer’s early period. Once more, German precedent comes to mind, this time in the

form of the wandering Lohengrin, who mysteriously appears as rescuer of a local lady. Though

often thought of as what Michael Kennedy called a “problem-opera,”160 Hugh is in one sense a

culmination of the soft pastoral manner that preoccupied Vaughan Williams throughout his pre-

war output. Here, not only is the wandering life romanticized as it is in Borrow’s work, but the

plot itself arguably assumes an overall secondary role to scene-painting qualities. As with On

Wenlock Edge, the focus in Hugh is not entirely on the drama, but more on the evocative

157
Vaughan Williams, Letter to Hubert Foss dated 25 March [1938]. Quoted in Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph
Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, pp. 256-257.
158
Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography,” in National Music and Other Essays, p. 191.
159
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 82.
160
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 179.

79
qualities of the musically-set text. It is as much a series of scenes as it is a successive narrative.

Indeed, Vaughan Williams uses the very word “tableaux” in his correspondence with Harold

Child. Elsewhere in the correspondence he makes it clear that his early conception of the work

proceeded along picturesque lines, and he expressed difficulty in thinking of the project in terms

of the dramatic. He also intended the opera to portray country dwellers as sympathetic people

and not the comic characters sometimes associated with rustic scenes.161 It is likely enough that

his folksong collecting work with real rural people in the countryside prompted such concerns.

The music at times contributes to the lack of drama in the opera. Eric Saylor’s recent

article on the dramatic application of folksong in Hugh and the later Sir John in Love (completed

1928) discusses how the composer uses the ten folksongs he quotes in the former opera during

static scenes such as the opening fair. Saylor finds that folk songs in this opera do not move the

drama along but rather appear during the times when the viewer would not be distracted by

detailed events and could focus more on the music.162 The beginning can give one the impression

of, to quote Kennedy once more, “an anthology of good tunes” rather than a homogenous, driven

narrative.163

It is worth pausing here to consider the additional fact that Vaughan Williams was living

in London and working on A London Symphony at about the time work on Hugh the Drover was

underway. This circumstance alone illustrates that while he was happy to produce many works

161
The Vaughan Williams-Child correspondence is attached as an appendix to Ursula Vaughan Williams’s book. See
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., pp. 402-422.
162
Eric Saylor, “Dramatic Applications of Folksong in Vaughan Williams’s Operas Hugh the Drover and Sir John in
Love,” in Journal of the Royal Music Association Vol. 134 No. 1 (May 2009), pp. 37-83. Saylor places his discussion
of Hugh and folksong as a non-dramatic element with respect to the broader problem of Vaughan Williams’s
operas as a whole lacking dramatic compulsion. Another, separate observation that Saylor makes also bears
quoting on account of its relationship to Vaughan Williams’s remarks concerning the special lore of people
inhabiting the countryside discussed in the previous chapter. Saylor writes on page 50 of his article: “…the very
presence of folksong among the people of rural England – a complex, long-standing oral tradition requiring musical
and literary sensitivity from its practitioners – showed that they possessed spiritual and emotional depths that
might not be perceived by outsiders.”
163
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 180.

80
celebrating the rural, he was equally capable of composing a large ode to one of Europe’s busiest

metropolises at the same time. In this he was decisively apart from many associated with the

Back-to-the-Land movement, including Morris. Moreover, Vaughan Williams remarked in a

program note to the symphony that the work might as well be called “Symphony by a Londoner”

rather than “A London Symphony.” At the same time he proposes that the sights and sounds

heard by a Londoner can stand in as objects of the music’s evocations. After this exposé, he

characteristically suggests that instead the whole thing be allowed to “stand or fall” as absolute

music.164 What is significant here, however, is that Vaughan Williams refers to himself as “a

Londoner” at all. Indeed, as Ottaway and Frogley point out in Grove, he considered himself a

Londoner rather than belonging early in his life to the rural county of Gloucestershire, where he

was born.165 The relevant statement by Ursula Vaughan Williams quoted in Chapter 1 reinforces

the association. This would seem to indicate that the division between country and city as part of

an ideological framework did not exist for him. True to the ambivalence that characterized his

personality, Vaughan Williams found much of interest in areas that were, according to certain

cultural patterns around him, supposed to be opposed.166

And yet is A London Symphony a wholesale celebration of the city? Alain Frogley has

addressed a curious circumstance involving the final movement, for which Vaughan Williams

neglects to offer any statement in his program note. Frogley discusses how a different program

note, written by Albert Coates for one of his performances of the work and abetted by Vaughan

Williams himself, carries a tantalizing synopsis. It casts the movement as a depiction of

164
Vaughan Williams, Program Note for A London Symphony, quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music,
p. 339.
165
Hugh Ottaway and Alain Frogley, “Vaughan Williams, Ralph,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online.
166
Nor is this tribute to the sounds and atmosphere of London an isolated example. Upon visiting the United States
in 1922, Vaughan Williams wrote to Holst expressing admiration for the skyscrapers of New York. See Cobbe, ed.,
Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, pp. 132-133. Vaughan Williams had developed an interest in
architecture at an early age. See Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., pp. 21, 88.

81
London’s hungry and unemployed abjectly marching in the city. Since this note was printed with

Vaughan Williams’s knowledge, and contains his own remarks elsewhere therein, it raises

questions about the nature of his views on the city.167 To what extent was Vaughan Williams like

Bela Bartók - a many-time city-dweller who nonetheless idealized the rural even at the expense

of the urban realm in which he chose to live?168

The second category of pre-Great War pastoral music by Vaughan Williams that I am

identifying is related to the mode in less clear ways. I have referred to this vein as the

“metaphysical pastoral,” and it is associated largely with the poetry of Walt Whitman in

Vaughan Williams’s early period. Two works exemplify this vein – Toward the Unknown

Region (1907), a song for chorus and orchestra, and A Sea Symphony (1903-1909) for soloists,

chorus, and orchestra, the composer’s first essay in the symphonic genre.169 The texts of both,

taken from Leaves of Grass, invoke natural scenery. While the Sea Symphony could be

considered as a kind of “sea pastoral,” the words of Toward the Unknown Region are not overtly

pastoral by any generic standard. Both use natural or quasi-natural imagery as metaphors for

exploring new horizons and attaining new states of being.

Although the texts of Vaughan Williams’s major pre-war Whitman compositions are not

in and of themselves conventionally pastoral, they are important in considering other pre-war

works by Vaughan Williams that more obviously relate to the term. A Sea Symphony is the

167
See Frogley, “H.G. Wells and Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony: politics and culture in fin-de-siècle
England,” in Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on The British Library Collections (London: The British Library,
1993), edited by Chris Banks, Arthur Searle, and Malcolm Turner, pp. 299-308.
168
Like Vaughan Williams, Bartók idealized the folk music he collected as well as those who sang it for him. To a
degree perhaps greater than Vaughan Williams, he distrusted urban culture and music despite living in New York
City during his last years. A good starting point for more information on this is Leon Botstein’s chapter “Out of
Hungary: Bartók, Modernism, and the Cultural Politics of Twenieth-Century Music,” in Bartók and His World
(Princeton University Press, 1995), edited by Péter Laki, pp. 3-63. Vaughan Williams lived in London until 1930,
when he and Adeline moved to the picturesque outskirts of Dorking in Surrey. After Adeline’s death in 1951 and
his marriage to Ursula Wood in 1953, Vaughan Williams moved back to London, where he held residence until his
death. He thus lived at various stages in his life amidst both rural and urban surroundings.
169
The work was at first referred to as “The Ocean” by Vaughan Williams.

82
largest project that occupied the composer before the war, both in terms of its size and the time

taken to complete it (1903-1909). It spans a remarkable period in which he matured as a

composer and finished his last formal lessons (with Ravel in 1908). Though a much smaller

work, the cantata Toward the Unknown Region is nonetheless among the larger compositions of

the pre-war period. Directly after its successful premiere in 1907, the composer made a revealing

remark in a letter to Ralph Wedgwood: “But after all it is only a step and I’ve got to do

something really big sometime. I think I am improving. It ‘comes off’ better than my earlier

things used to…”170 The “big thing,” as it turned out, was the Sea Symphony, finished some two

years later and first performed in 1910. Ursula Vaughan Williams claims years after that her

husband long worked assiduously in composing the symphony, the texts of which were “full of

fresh thoughts.” He was conscious that it was to be the biggest thing he had yet attempted, and

took great care in crafting it.171 Stephen Town thoroughly recounts how Vaughan Williams left

behind many revisions and stages of manuscripts for the work.172 Both he and others connect the

work with the optimistic first decade of the twentieth century. Once again, Michael Kennedy

provides relevant remarks, this time in the context of Whitman and Vaughan Williams’s early

nature music:

[Walt Whitman’s poetry] reflected the spirit of a new

century, a bursting forth of new worlds of human and
scientific endeavor…The reason for Whitman’s appeal to
Vaughan Williams is fairly obvious…In Vaughan
Williams’s nature there was a strong vein of mysticism
veiled by a thoroughly down-to-earth commonsense
approach to his art. He was a romantic; he was also an
agnostic, a questioner; he believed in national roots and he
looked to the past in order to venture into the

170
Quoted in Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 400.
171
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 65.
172
See Stephen Town, “’Full of fresh thoughts’: Vaughan Williams, Whitman and the Genesis of A Sea Symphony,”
in Adams and Wells, eds., Vaughan Williams Essays, pp. 73-101.

83
 future…Whitman presented a love of nature plus a
combination of plain sentiment with mystical yearnings.”173

Byron Adams writes of Vaughan Williams’s fascination with Whitman as a “repudiation” of the

Rossetti aesthetic that the composer had found attractive in the preceding years, further

remarking that he was drawn to Whitman’s poetry on the account of its “out-of-doors” quality.174

In this respect, at least, Vaughan Williams’s earlier liking for the poetry of Rossetti, which he not

only set musically but also quoted in an article on Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, finds one

corollary with his pre-war enthusiasm for Whitman.175 In setting the poetry of the one, he

musically drew out lush and evocative natural descriptions and rich atmospheres. In setting the

poetry of the other, he musically evoked wide open spaces and the exploration of new horizons.

Both fit comfortably under the wide umbrella of the pastoral mode.

Another pastoral-related work using non-Whitman texts but nonetheless connected with

related themes was left incomplete during this period. It was to be a song for baritone, chorus

and orchestra entitled The Future and based upon Matthew Arnold’s poem of the same name.

The words recount the life journey of a man, positing him as a wanderer who rides a ship down

the “stream of life” toward the ocean. A piano-vocal sketch of the opening measures survives

and resides at the British Library. It suggests an opening not unlike that of Toward the Unknown

Region.

173
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 82.
174
Adams, “‘No Armpits, Please, We’re British,’: Whitman and English Music, 1884-1936,” in Walt Whitman and
Modern Music: War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood (New York & London: Garland, 200), edited by Lawrence
Kramer, p. 30.
175
The quotation in question appears in a 1903 article on Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben that Vaughan Williams
wrote for The Vocalist. He borrows lines 5-8 from Rossetti’s The House of Life in the course of describing the love
song from this work. Quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, p. 161. Vaughan Williams’s decision to
cite Rossetti in the course of writing on one of Strauss’s better known compositions only reinforces the link
between German Romanticism and Vaughan Williams’s early artistic consciousness.

84
Ex. 3.7: Vaughan Williams, The Future (Incomplete sketch, British Library Add. MS 57283, fol.

19, mm. 1-9)

85
Ex. 3.8: Vaughan Williams, Toward the Unknown Region, mm. 1-5 (reduction)

Thus the theme of the wanderer present in the songs, and connected with the search for

knowledge of the past in the last chapter, finds another outlet in a group of works related in

various degrees to life’s future prospects.176

I have shown how much of what lies behind Vaughan Williams’s broadly defined

“pastoral” music dating from before the war is predominantly Arcadian and/or otherwise

optimistic in nature. This is not surprising, for several interrelated reasons. First, this was the era

when he both discovered and started collecting folksong. Once he had actually worked as a

collector, Vaughan Williams formulated views that in some measure reinforced his previous

idealizations about folk culture. If the rural was the realm of the folk, and pursuing folksong was

a positive pursuit for British composers, then composing music that constructs a positive view of

the countryside, and in many cases may even borrow from folk tunes and manners, is consistent

with such an outlook. This recalls the Arcadian pastoral pattern from ancient times – the

portrayal of the rural landscape from the point of view of the urban wealthy who go there for

leisure. Second, although there is no evidence that Vaughan Williams composed anything

176
In a 1963 letter to Michael Kennedy, Ursula Vaughan Williams mentions that she wished her late husband had
completed The Future. (John Rylands Library, The Michael Kennedy Collection: KEN/3/1/7/96.)

86
directly inspired by the Back-to-the-Land movement, his focus upon scenic and “setting-out”

themes in his early pastoral music is consistent both with his personal situation at the time and

with a cultural mood that treasured rural England as a national heritage and as an ideal

corrective to what were widely seen as the dangerous excesses of modern capitalism.

In light of such circumstances, much of Vaughan Williams’s pre-war music related to the

pastoral mode takes on dimensions shared by the literary tradition of the ode. Broadly defined,

an ode is simply a poem extolling a person, place, thing, or idea of some sort. As is true of the

pastoral mode, the ode’s history is diverse and wide-ranging. The two traditions have intersected

to form numerous cross-relationships. Several of the literary ode’s major practitioners –

Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge – were writers Vaughan Williams knew well and even quoted

or referenced occasionally in his own writings.177 In the English ode tradition it was common for

these and other poets to use pastoral imagery in the service of extolling not only the beauties of

nature but much else by metaphorical extension.178 In one of his most famous odic poems,

Intimations of Immortality (set to music by Vaughan Williams’s younger friend and colleague

Gerald Finzi), Wordsworth writes from the perspective of an older person looking back on his

youth and celebrating his former ability to take great joy in the beauty of nature. Although

Vaughan Williams never set a text by Wordsworth, we know that during his youth he was

affected by the nature-praising qualities in early Romantic poet’s verse. Here it is helpful to

177
See Vaughan Williams: “Making Your Own Music,” in National Music and Other Essays, p. 238; “Local
Musicians,” in The Abinger Chronicle Vol. 1, No. 1 (1939), pp. 1-3 (quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on
Music, pp. 79-81); “Hands off the Third,” in Music and Musicians Vol. 6, No. 2 (1957), p. 15 (quoted in Vaughan
Williams on Music, pp. 119-121); and “Sibelius at 90: Greatness and Popularity,” in Daily Telegraph & Morning Post
No. 31, 308 (8 Dec. 1955), p. 6 (quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, pp. 175-178). Vaughan
Williams quotes Coleridge in the form of the epigraph that heads the third movement (“Landscape”) of the
Sinfonia antartica.
178
A good starting place for more information on the English ode tradition is George Nauman Schuster’s The
English Ode from Milton to Keats (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964). For a concise treatment of the Western
musical ode traditions, see Michael Tilmouth, et al, “Ode (ii),” in Grove Music Online
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/50067 (accessed September 23, 2011).

87
briefly revisit the 1898 letter to Ralph Wedgwood: “My heart goes through the same manoeuvres

as Wordsworths when he saw a rainbow when I see a long low range of hills…”179

Many of Vaughan Williams’s early compositions contain texts and music that

predominantly celebrate nature and evocative atmospheres, using the pastoral mode as it relates

to love and other emotions. Other compositions extol optimism by anticipating both personal and

communal futures. The odic theme runs throughout, presenting across many works a tribute to

the beautiful land of an idealized folk. Nature is largely positioned as a backdrop for Vaughan

Williams’s own optimism on the threshold of what would prove to be a long and successful

career.

What are we finally to make of the relationship between the pastoral trends of around the

turn of the twentieth century, Vaughan Williams’s music, and Vaughan Williams the man? In

sum, one must say that while he shared much with his political and literary surroundings, he

assimilated and reflected them musically in ways that were very individual. Like many

associated with the Back-to-the-Land movement, Vaughan Williams was an inheritor of

privilege who was able to pursue his interests with a sense of leisurely detachment. In this he was

like Morris, Arnold, and others who took up progressive cultural causes at this time. In this, too,

Vaughan Williams adhered to one of the oldest profiles of the pastoral mode – he was a member

of the upper classes whose optimistic and idealized treatments of his countryside-inspired

subjects reflected the confidence of his secure socio-economic status. From a musical standpoint,

the first period finds Vaughan Williams often drawing from likewise conventional sources –

particularly German Romantic vocal music – to set texts that predominantly celebrate natural

179
Vaughan Williams, personal letter to Ralph Wedgwood dated “early June 1898.” Quoted in Cobbe, ed., Letters
of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, p. 31.

88
beauty and communal brotherhood. Such a complex network of currents on one level cautions us

against drawing fast and overly reductive conclusions about Vaughan Williams’s music at this

time. On another level it both allows us to see what patterns are there and how they relate both to

the man and the world in which he lived. In his early pastoral music, he assumed multiple roles –

the budding folklorist, the maturing composer, and the cultural optimist who, like the travelers

about whom he was fond of reading, boldly set out to face the unknown. Little could he have

imagined what lay in the period directly ahead. After the war, Vaughan Williams did not lose his

appreciation for the beauty of the pastoral world, but seldom again would his art so closely

conform to unmediated Arcadianism.

89
 Chapter 4
Vaughan Williams and the Pastoral Elegy, Part I: The Aftermath of the Great War

The pastoral compositions immediately following the Great War, with A Pastoral

Symphony occupying the central place, are among the most recognizable works by Vaughan

Williams. Ironically, this music has, at least initially, figured prominently in criticism of

Vaughan Williams as provincial. It has also emerged as a principal source of confusion in

considering the composer’s relationship with the pastoral mode. Some early critics, hasty to

typecast both the pastoral mode and Vaughan Williams himself, spoke with scorn of A Pastoral

Symphony and what they saw as related music. Among the most famous invectives is ultra-

modernist Elizabeth Lutyens’s afore-mentioned derogatory term “cowpat music.”180 Even those

who admired Vaughan Williams spoke of A Pastoral Symphony in terms of unflattering

ruralisms, for example Hugh Allen’s remark, also afore-mentioned, that the symphony reminded

him of Vaughan Williams rolling over and over on a ploughed field on a wet day. Few may have

expected that a subsequent statement made by Vaughan Williams in private correspondence

would connect the work rather to the composer’s wartime service in France.181 In recent years,

scholars have offered commentaries that further re-situate this composition in light of Vaughan

Williams’s experiences in the Great War. Michael Kennedy’s summary statement that A

Pastoral Symphony amounts to Vaughan Williams’s “war requiem” has firmly replaced earlier

180
I should further add here that this statement appears in a variety of sources and contexts. Originally, Lutyens
used it during a lecture she gave at Dartington Summer School of Music during the 1950s. (See “Cowpat Music,” in
The Oxford Dictionary of Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy2.library.uiuc.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t237/e2526?q=cowpat&search
=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit, Accessed 5 May, 2010.)
181
This and more information on the reception of Vaughan Williams’s post-Great War pastoral music may be found
within in a broader discussion of the composer’s reception by Alain Frogley: “Constructing Englishness in music:
national character and the reception of Vaughan Williams,” in Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies, pp. 1-22.
The quotes given and not otherwise cited may be found in Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pp.
155-156.

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responses as the conventional wisdom on this music.182 Eric Saylor’s recent study explains how

we may see the Pastoral Symphony and other post-Great War compositions not as examples

merely of “soft pastoral,” or frivolous, Edenesque pursuits, but rather as being informed by the

“hard pastoral” or a tragic, “Death in Arcadia” variety that hasty typesetters of Vaughan

Williams and the pastoral have been slow to recognize.183 However, if A Pastoral Symphony may

be freshly understood in some way to act as a mournful or otherwise somber response to the war

that directly preceded it, and if other works from the period immediately following it have been

implicated in this aesthetic,184 what remains largely unexplored is a closer examination of just

how this music coincides with the long-standing convention of elegy. As one of the most

prominent of the hard pastoral avenues, elegy deals in its most widely understood form with

personal loss and mourning. This chapter will address this confluence first by examining some

widely held traits of English elegy and how people have understood and employed it. It will then

discuss Vaughan Williams’s relationship with elegy, focusing first upon his immediate post-

Great War pastoral music before considering his post-World War II music in the next chapter.

The concept of elegy (the term comes from the Greek word elegos, meaning “mournful

song”) has flourished in the past as a mode in its own right, giving way to a series of sub-

categories to rival those of the pastoral mode itself. Despite having a long and varied tradition of

its own, elegy has often figured prominently in close association with the pastoral mode,

182
See Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 155. Apart from the Frogley writing cited in the second
footnote of this chapter, see also the following for discussions of A Pastoral Symphony as a war work: Mellers,
Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion, pp. 86-93; and Pike, Vaughan Williams and the Symphony, pp. 76-106.
183
Eric Saylor, “It’s Not Lambkins Frisking At All,” pp. 39-59.
184
See, for example, Michael Steinberg, Choral Masterworks: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 2005),
pp. 296-297; and Byron Adams, “Book Review: Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion by Wilfrid Mellers
(London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989),” in The Musical Quarterly Vol. 74, No. 4 (1990), pp. 629-635.

91
beginning with the Idylls of Theocritus and continuing in art and literature ever since.185 In the

Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature article entitled “Elegy,” Melissa Zeiger names the

pastoral mode as “one of elegy’s major conventions” and goes on to discuss how the two modes

have been related.186 The relationship achieves a distinct identity when one considers its

importance in the cultural heritage of England. Zeigler identifies John Milton’s elegiac poem

“Lycidas,” written in 1637 on the occasion of Milton’s university friend Edward King’s death at

sea, as a significant point from which the English pastoral elegy flourished in its own right.187

In a seminal study on the English elegy, Peter Sacks discusses its primary bent: “the

English versions of the defining form admitted a variety of subject matter to so-called elegies.

But the definition that gradually gathered currency, particularly after the sixteenth century, was

elegy as a poem of mortal loss and consolation.”188 This is what commentators have referred to

as the “funeral elegy.”189 Reaching back to link Theocritus’s poetry (in this case the First Idyll,

which I shall briefly discuss in the next chapter) with the English funeral elegy of later centuries,

David Kennedy identifies several important pastoral corollaries at the beginning of a recent

study:

Theocritus’ poem is notable because it establishes a number

of conventions and figures that become characteristics of
funeral elegy in English. These include: the invocation of a
muse; the rebuking of nymphs for not being present to
prevent death; a procession of mourners, in this case
animals, shepherds and divine beings; the use of pathetic
fallacy, that is the attribution of human emotions to the
world of nature; a sense of the natural order being disrupted

185
For a large and encompassing treatment of some of the major treatments of elegy in ages past, see The Oxford
Handbook of the Elegy (Oxford University Press, 2010), edited by Karen Weisman.
186
Melissa Zeiger, “Elegy,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Accessed online 7 May, 2010.
http://www.oxford-britishliterature.com/entry?entry=t198.e0153&srn=2&ssid=568568778#FIRSTHIT
187
Ibid. See especially the opening paragraphs.
188
Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985), p. 3.
189
Zeiger, “Elegy.”

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 by death; catalogues of flowers and animals; and the
apotheosis of the dead person.190

The long and identifiably English tradition of elegiac pastoral literature takes on an

additional dimension when considered in conjunction with the milieu of the Great War. First, it

is significant how English literature, especially poetry, played upon the psyches and sensibilities

of British soldiers as they struggled in horrific circumstances to perform their duties and cope

with the events that unfolded around them. In his landmark study The Great War and Modern

Memory, Paul Fussell devotes an entire chapter to this subject alone. He mentions “the

unparalleled literariness of all ranks who fought in the Great War” and goes on to write:

By 1914, it was possible for soldiers to be not merely

literate but rigorously literary, for the Great War occurred
at a special historical moment when two “liberal” forces
were powerfully coinciding in England. On the one hand,
the belief in the educative powers of classical and English
literature was still extremely strong. On the other, the
appeal of popular education and “self-improvement” was at
its peak, and such education was still conceived largely in
humanistic terms.191

Perhaps even more crucial is the influence that elegiac and pastoral subjects brought to bear upon

the poetry read and produced during the Great War. According to Edna Longley, “Elegy is

arguably both a genre and the over-arching genre of war poetry. Indeed, the Great War may have

made all lyric poetry more consciously elegiac and self-elegiac.”192 In discussing background in

a chapter on postmodern elegy, Thomas Travisano remarks:

The pastoral elegy maintained so strong a hold on the

Georgian poets who served as front line soldiers in World

190
David Kennedy, Elegy (New York: Routledge, The New Critical Idiom Series, 2007), pp. 12-13.
191 th
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 25 Anniversary Edition (Oxford University Press, 2000), p.
157. Alun Howkins confirms that Classical and English literature attained a prominent place in schools and
universities in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, helped by political and
nationalistic factors. See Howkins, “The Discovery of Rural England,” p. 65.
192
Edna Longley, “The Great War, history, and the English lyric,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the
First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2005), edited by Vincent Sherry, pp. 72-73.

93
 War I that one finds Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and
others of that brilliant cadre consistently evoking pastoral
motifs, if only for ironic contrast, in their threnodies from
the trenches.193

The reference to irony is significant, as it assumes a central role in writings of the Great

War. The juxtaposition of beautiful landscapes and the terrible carnage that took place in the

French battlefield added a unique poignancy to elegiac and pastoral expression related to the

conflict. Such approaches expanded the genre in ways hitherto unrealized. Mourning and

remembrance came to occupy the same space, and the Arcadian ideal merged with the harsh

realities of the war. Paul Fussell repeatedly illustrates the central role of irony in the

circumstances of the Great War. For example, he discusses how the pastoral landscapes of

northern and central France (the site of the major scenes of English bloodshed) at once prompted

soldiers to recall the idyllic English summer of 1914 preceding the war and yet also served as the

setting for horrors such as the notorious Battle of the Somme, in which thousands of British

soldiers lost their lives in an astonishingly short period of time. In addition, Fussell describes

how the sight of barbed wire and other markers added to the sick irony by means of, on the one

hand, reminding soldiers of the fences and hedgerows of rural England while on the other

reminding them of the harsh brutality of their current circumstances. He offers a summary

statement in a chapter devoted to pastoral considerations:

Recourse to the pastoral is an English mode of both fully

gauging the calamities of the Great War and imaginatively
protecting oneself against them. Pastoral reference, whether
to literature or to actual rural localities and objects, is a way
of invoking a code to hint by antithesis at the indescribable;
at the same time, it is a comfort in itself, like rum, a deep
dugout or woolly vest.194

193
Thomas J. Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern
Aesthetic (University of Virginia Press, 1999), p. 239.
194
Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, pp. 231-254. See p. 235 for the summary quotation provided. Eric
Saylor argues similarly in “‘It’s Not Lambkins Frisking At All,’” p. 43.

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Edna Longley’s remarks on Great War literature similarly stress the importance of mutual

antithesis, though they downplay the role of irony:

The issue of pastoral and war is not confined to whether

invocations of rural landscape figure naively as nostalgia or
knowingly as irony. What matters is the ability to hold
pastoral (the sum of literary negotiations with Nature) and
war in the same frame.195

Throughout all of these accounts the theme of soldiers’ personal experience, and how

they related it to what they both read and wrote, runs deeply. As discussed, part of this

experience was the English tradition of literature as appropriated by especially literate British

soldiers of all classes in the Great War.196 In a way, this mirrors the trajectory of elegy itself,

which, like pastoral mode, has a long tradition and yet is adaptable to the parameters and needs

of new times and circumstances.197 In the words of John D. Rosenberg, “The long history of

English elegy is a fresh pouring of new tears into ancient vessels.” 198 Understanding these points

is essential in assessing the music related to the Great War. In an article already cited, Eric

Saylor discusses ways in which Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, and Arthur Bliss access past

traditions to inform their music directly inspired by the war. He writes, “the modernity of the

pastoral comes from its power to modify its conventional signifiers in ways that were relevant to

contemporary culture – and no event was more relevant to British culture in the early twentieth

century than the First World War.”199 Having outlined the primary characteristics of pastoral, or

195
Longley, “The Great War, history, and the English lyric,” p. 79.
196
The additional point should be made here that the rate of literary in England among the middle and lower
th
classes during the early 20 century was of an unprecedented level. For a full treatment and account of this trend,
see Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2nd Edition (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010).
197
See Zeiger, “Elegy” (especially the section titled “Elegy and Inheritance”).
198
John D. Rosenberg, Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature (London: Anthem Press,
2005), p. 5.
199
Saylor, “English Pastoral Music and the Great War,” p. 45.

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“funeral,” elegy, and considered its place in Great War cultural history, let us examine related

works by Vaughan Williams.

A Pastoral Symphony

Excluding the romance for violin and orchestra more generally known by its picturesque

title The Lark Ascending, which Vaughan Williams composed in 1914 and revised in 1920, A

Pastoral Symphony is the first large-scale work that he completed after the Great War. It seems

to have been the only major work he began composing, or at least otherwise actively planned,

during the war itself. Michael Kennedy offers 1916-1921 as the time of composition.200 Ursula

Vaughan Williams confirms this date, citing her husband’s remarks and the time he spent

working in the battlefield ambulance corps at Ecoivres as the starting point for the symphony.

She writes: “A bugler used to practice, and this sound became part of that evening landscape and

is the genesis of the long trumpet cadenza in the second movement of the symphony: les airs

lointains d’un cor mélancholique et tendre.”201 This is the most indirect of the references made

by the composer’s wife, and presumably originating with him, that addresses the aesthetic and

programmatic origins of the symphony. Another statement comes directly from Vaughan

Williams himself in a 1938 letter to Ursula, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

I’m glad that you liked the symph. I did rather myself after
many years. It is really war time music – a great deal of it
incubated when I used to go up night after night with the
200
Kennedy, The Works of Vaughan Williams, p. 412.
201
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 121. A curious discrepancy exists on this point in the secondary literature.
Referring to the bugler inspiring the music in the second movement of A Pastoral Symphony, Frank Howes writes:
“…a recollection of camp life with the R.A.M.C. at Bordon in Hampshire where the bugler hit the seventh as a
missed shot for the octave.” See Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 1954), p.
23. However, Ursula Vaughan Williams’s book, the Grove article on Vaughan Williams by Frogley and Ottaway, and
other sources imply that the bugler was on the French battlefield itself. In any case, the experience of hearing the
bugler was significant for the creation of A Pastoral Symphony, and the second movement in particular, no matter
where Vaughan Williams heard it exactly. I here offer special thanks to Eric Saylor for sharing his insights with me
on this matter.

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 ambulance wagon at Ecoiv[r]es & we went up a steep hill
& there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset
– its [sic] not really Lambkins frisking at all as most people
take for granted.202

The only other written information on the work offered by the composer comes at the beginning

of the program note he provided for its first performance. The note begins: “The mood of this

Symphony is, as its title suggests, almost entirely quiet and contemplative – there are few

fortissimos and few allegros.”203 The remainder contains purely technical descriptions of the

symphony’s movements.

In these limited remarks, both direct and indirect, there is much to discuss in terms of the

Great War. First, evening is the time of day mentioned in both statements. Past commentary has

associated A Pastoral Symphony with a predominantly “grey” quality, and even Vaughan

Williams himself acknowledged the work has a certain consistency of character in the last of his

statements quoted above. However, this also formed part of the criticism of the work as a whole.

Constant Lambert, for example, wrote in Music Ho!: “In a work like Vaughan Williams’s

Pastoral Symphony it is no exaggeration to say that the creation of a particular type of grey,

reflective, English-landscape mood has outweighed the exigencies of symphonic form.” He then

claimed that the work’s “monotony of texture and lack of form” lent to the difficulty of such

music being understood outside of England.204 The fact that Lambert was almost certainly

unaware of the origins at the time he wrote Music Ho! serves to lead him astray on multiple

levels. Supposing that Vaughan Williams was completely preoccupied with English landscape

202
Ralph Vaughan Williams, personal letter to Ursula Wood, 4 October 1938. Quoted in Cobbe, ed., Letters of
Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, p. 265. Ursula quotes a nearly identical version of this statement (with
negligible spelling differences and the first two sentences omitted) in her volume. See Ursula Vaughan Williams,
R.V.W., p. 121. The statement itself forms the middle part of a longer letter, the remainder of which is not directly
related to A Pastoral Symphony.
203
Vaughan Williams, program note to A Pastoral Symphony, quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music,
p. 341.
204
Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline, 3rd Edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), p. 107.

97
and folksong in composing A Pastoral Symphony, Lambert not only failed to grasp the work’s

inspiration in a general sense, but he also missed out on the opportunity to ask pertinent

questions. In any case, Lambert himself was too young to have participated firsthand in the war,

and did not directly share in the experiences of soldiers such as Vaughan Williams.

A second look at the significance of twilight and what this meant in the Great War

milieu, in conjunction with Vaughan Williams’s and Ursula’s statements, suggests that what

Lambert and others pejoratively called “grey” was actually a key point. Far from making the

music dull, it is what gives the work much of its unique character and effect. Returning to Paul

Fussell’s study of the Great War perhaps reveals extra significance in Vaughan Williams’s

written remarks. Fussell describes how times of sunrise and sunset, when the war landscape was

illuminated by dimmed light and when stand-to’s and other routine events took place, became

associated with special meanings in the experience of participants. He states: “It was a cruel

reversal that sunrise and sunset, established by over a century of Romantic poetry and painting as

the tokens of hope and peace and rural charm, should now be exactly the moments of heightened

ritual anxiety.” Further on he writes: “This exploitation of waxing or waning half-light is one of

the distinct hallmarks of Great War rhetoric. It signals a constant reaching out towards traditional

significance…It reveals an attempt to make some sense of the war in relation to inherited

tradition.”205 In light of this, Vaughan Williams’s description of his dusk excursions into a

“Corot-like” landscape takes on added significance, given Corot’s well-known use of pastel and

dimmed colors in his nature paintings.206 To borrow a sentence from Eric Saylor, “Vaughan

205
Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, pp. 52, 55.
206
For more general information on Corot’s techniques and experimentation with light in his paintings, see Fronia
E. Wissman, “Corot, Camille,” in Oxford Art Online. Accessed 15 May 2010.
http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy2.library.uiuc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T019570?q=corot&search=
quick&pos=1&_start=1#T019572.

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Williams was not viewing the postwar world through rose-colored glasses, but rather, in his

evocation of Corot, peering through a glass, darkly.”207

The Great War literature and written recollections that Fussell cites in support of his

statements sometimes bear distinct elegiac overtones. Perhaps the best example is a line from

Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen” that reads: “At the going down of the sun and in the

morning, We shall remember them.”208 However, it happens that the relationship between sunset

and elegy actually dates back at least to one of the most well-known pastoral elegies written in

English – Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” first published in 1751. The

very opening stanzas of the poem demonstrate a descriptive mixture of sunset and physical

landscape:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower

The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree’s shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a moldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

207
Saylor, “It’s Not Lambkins Frisking At All,” p. 49. One other recent study by Daniel Grimley offers fresh analysis
of A Pastoral Symphony from the standpoint of its modernity, including related discussions of Fussell’s
observations quoted here and the pastoral paintings of Paul Nash. See Grimley, “Landscape and Distance: Vaughan
Williams, Modernism, and the Symphonic Pastoral,” in British Music and Modernism 1895-1960 (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2010), edited by Matthew Riley, pp. 147-174.
208
See Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, p. 56.

99
 The extent to which A Pastoral Symphony relates to the ironies associated with the Great

War is also worth further exploration in the context of elegy. In Vaughan Williams’s remarks

one may discern that in the midst of his service he was acutely aware of the strange beauty of the

landscape before him and its influence upon his creative imagination. In this context it is worth

reminding ourselves exactly what Vaughan Williams’s duties were on his nightly excursions into

the “Corot-like landscape” with the ambulance orderly. He carried back the wounded and dying

with the knowledge that some of his friends were among those who were perishing in like

circumstances.209 Ursula Vaughan Williams describes Vaughan Williams’s experiences in 1916,

after he had learned of the death (during the Battle of the Somme) of his close friend and

promising young English composer George Butterworth:

For Ralph, the loss of Butterworth’s friendship and the

unfulfilled promise of his music were a profound sorrow. It
was a time when casualty lists recorded almost every day
the loss of some friend or acquaintance, and the wholesale
slaughter of a generation of the youth of the nation left few
homes untouched. Working in the ambulance gave Ralph
vivid awareness of how men died.210

In the sentences following this excerpt, Ursula describes how Vaughan Williams and his unit

“marched through the autumnal landscapes, which seemed uncannily quiet” en route to join the

Battle of the Somme, the experience of which Vaughan Williams was ultimately spared.211 Thus

the link between his experiences with loss, death, and the aspects of landscape that Vaughan

Williams cited with regard to A Pastoral Symphony can hardly seem separable in multiple

209
In a letter to Holst, Vaughan Williams explicitly laid out his duties with the ambulance: “I am ‘Wagon orderly’
and go up the line every night to bring back wounded & sick on a motor ambulance – this all takes place at night –
except an occasional day journey for urgent cases.” (Vaughan Williams, personal letter to Gustav Holst dated “late
June 1916.” Quoted in Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, p. 109.)
210
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 122. Vaughan Williams’s letters to Butterworth’s father during the time
following George’s death make for poignant reading. See Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-
1958, pp. 110-111, 116-117.
211
Ibid.

100
instances – the excursions Vaughan Williams describes, and the march in anticipation of joining

what would become probably the most infamous battle of the entire conflict.212 Indeed, they fit in

all too well with the ironic, or at least dichotomous, treatment of landscape and how this became

a distinctly elegiac and pastoral theme in the course of the Great War. They also conform to how

traditional understandings and perceptions of natural beauty took on connotations of brutality

and suffering in an unprecedented way.

There are grounds for postulating an additional landscape-related inspiration behind A

Pastoral Symphony. A corollary exists between this work and an earlier manuscript of a different

work – the first of the unpublished Whitman nocturnes for baritone, semi-chorus, and orchestra –

“Come, O voluptious sweet-breathed earth.” The first and third nocturnes bear the dates August

18, 1908. All three, as Michael Kennedy explains, exist only in incomplete form. Nonetheless, he

describes these works’ manuscripts as “the most important of all the unpublished MSS up to

1914” on account of what they reveal concerning the development of Vaughan Williams’s

musical language up to that point. Interestingly, Kennedy singles out the third, “Out of the

rolling ocean,” as containing ideas that appear in later works such as Hugh the Drover, The

Pilgrim’s Progress, and A Pastoral Symphony, among others.213 The connection between the

third nocturne and A Pastoral Symphony is a significant avenue of exploration in its own right,

but the similarities between the opening melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas of the symphony

and the opening of the first nocturne in particular are also striking. Shown below in Example 4-A

is the opening thematic sequence of A Pastoral Symphony, directly after the initial undulating

triads played by the woodwinds. The thematic action at this point shifts to the strings, beginning

with the D anacrusis in the solo violin line in measure 8, just before the double bar line. What

212
For some additional discussion on this point, see Byron Adams, “Scripture, Church, and culture: biblical texts in
the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams,” pp. 112-113.
213
See Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 41.

101
follows is a G Mixolydian-grounded melody placed above a series of second inversion triads in

flat sonorities descending by half and quarter notes in whole and half steps, and later moving in a

triplet rhythm.

Ex. 4.1: Vaughan Williams, A Pastoral Symphony: Mov. I, mm. 6-12 (particularly the strings and

horn accompaniment at mm. 9-12)

These measures demonstrate straightaway Arnold Whittall’s description of the work as “a

symphony about what happens to G as a tonic when a wide variety of pressures – diatonic,

102
chromatic, modal – are applied to it.”214 These processes may also be seen in the opening of

Vaughan Williams’s drafted first Whitman nocturne of 1908, shown below in Example 4.2. Here

the G Mixolydian melody is nearly identical to that seen in A Pastoral Symphony and, apart from

some minor rhythmic and other differences, the supporting harmonies behave as they do in the

symphony.

Ex. 4.2: Vaughan Williams, Three Whitman Nocturnes – No. 1, “Come O Voluptious [sic] sweet

breathed Earth” (Sketch, British Library Add. MS 57283, fol. 1, mm. 1-4)

If one accepts the kinship between these two openings, then the obvious question is

whether the likeness speaks to anything beyond merely another example of Vaughan Williams

borrowing from older, often discarded music in composing new works.215 In exploring this

possibility, it is helpful to look at further facts. First, the 1908 date places the first Whitman

nocturne in a period during which Vaughan Williams was at the height of his musical

214
Arnold Whittall, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 65.
215
This is not the only work by Vaughan Williams dating from the first decade of the twentieth century that has
been compared thematically to the opening of A Pastoral Symphony. In discussing Harnham Down, one of three
“orchestral impressions” that Vaughan Williams composed between 1904 and 1907, Michael Vaillancourt draws
attention to the similarities between their opening themes. (See Vaillancourt, “Coming of Age: The Earliest
Orchestral Music,” p. 42.) In Chapter 5 I will examine Harnham Down more closely in a different context.

103
involvement with Whitman’s poetry, as discussed in Chapter 3. But as Ursula reveals, he had

with him a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass during his latter stint (at least) of service in Great

War France,216 and at the end of his life confessed to Michael Kennedy to have had a lifelong

and abiding interest in Whitman’s poetry that extended past the first decade of the twentieth

century. 217 (This is further evidenced by his return to Whitman texts in Dona Nobis Pacem,

completed in 1936.) The title of the first nocturne does not come from the Drum Taps section of

Leaves of Grass, as Kennedy mistakenly suggests for all three nocturnes.218 Rather, it originates

within the twenty-first section of Song of Myself, perhaps Whitman’s most well-known poetic

achievement. In this lengthy poem of over 50 sections, Whitman explores a wide collection of

topics and tropes, including much reference to both death and the pastoral mode. The twenty-first

section in particular concerns itself with the narrator as poet and features some striking evening

pastoral imagery toward the end.

Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!

Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of the departed sunset – earth of the mountains misty-
topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with
blue!219

It is certainly not difficult to imagine that Vaughan Williams might have recalled these very

lines, dealing as they do with sunset and earthly beauty, during his evening missions with the

216
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 128-129. Ursula describes Vaughan Williams using a small copy of Leaves of
Grass to record duty reminders when he worked in an artillery unit at the front.
217
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 100. The matter is also discussed by Byron Adams in
multiple sources – “No Armpits, Please, We’re British,” p. 25; and “Scripture, Church, and culture: biblical texts in
the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams,” p. 104.
218
Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 41. Only the second nocturne, “By the
Bivuoac’s Fitful Flame,” features text from Drum Taps, a section of Leaves of Grass that appeared with the 1867
edition and that presents poetry in response to the Civil War.
219
One will notice straightaway the slight discrepancies between the first line cited in Whitman’s text versus the
line as Vaughan Williams wrote it on the first nocturne’s manuscript. However, in the remainder of the manuscript,
the music of which resembles A Pastoral Symphony in less explicit ways than the introduction just discussed,
Vaughan Williams’s words in the vocal line leave little doubt about the fact that he was citing this particular poem.

104
ambulance orderly, especially if he carried Whitman’s poetry with him during his service. Nor is

it any great leap to question whether Vaughan Williams may have consciously recast in his mind

this fragment of his unpublished Whitman nocturne when the first ideas for the symphony were

germinating less than a decade later and under very special circumstances.

Taking this along with the other parts of my discussion of A Pastoral Symphony, I point

to the common theme of landscape, either specifically that of Ecoivres and/or that otherwise

experienced, as being central to any consideration of the music as an elegy. By now this point

may seem obvious enough. However, the extent to which even champions of the work have

emphasized the mood or some other aspect of the music, to the partial or whole omission of its

intersection with landscape and other recognizably pastoral themes therein, justifies the

reaffirmation. Herbert Howells, in a thoughtful article, wrote that the symphony is “a frame of

mind” rather than a depiction of a scene.220 He seemed to take his cue from the few words

Vaughan Williams provided in the program note for the premiere.221 Howells, of course, likely

had no knowledge of what Vaughan Williams later privately revealed to Ursula about Ecoivres.

Frank Howes wrote: “But it is not very pictorial; it is, as the composer in his own note on it

suggested, contemplative, and the mood is singularly sustained.” Howes goes on to acknowledge

that the work was conceived in northern France, but then apparently downplays the notion, even

seeming to contradict somewhat his earlier statement with the following: “The scenery in the

Pastoral Symphony is not spectacular and northern France with its willows and streams is much

220
Howells’s take on Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony closely resembles Beethoven’s attitude toward his
own Pastoral Symphony (No. 6 in F Major), completed in 1808. Beethoven remarked that the symphony is “more
an expression of feeling than tone painting.” For more on this work, see William Kinderman, Beethoven, 2nd
Edition (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 127 ff.
221
See Herbert Howells, “Vaughan Williams ‘Pastoral’ Symphony,” in Music & Letters Vol. 3, No. 2 (April, 1922), pp.
122-132.

105
like southern England.”222 Both Howes’s and Howells’s remarks, however perceptive, appear

dated in light of later information. Yet even very recent commentaries on the symphony persist

in separating its title from rural imagery. Raymond Monelle writes this about A Pastoral

Symphony: “The chroniclers tell us that Vaughan Williams thought not of pastoralism or of

strangeness, however, but of real experience during the First World War.”223 He goes on to cite

the bugle player as an example of that “real” experience.224 Setting aside Monelle’s dubious

account of what the chroniclers actually say, such a remark fails to acknowledge that pastoralism

and strangeness quite often embodied real and intertwined psychological experiences for those

participating in the Great War, as Paul Fussell and Vaughan Williams himself have

demonstrated. But the statement also flies in the face of how the threads of psychology, mood

and landscape are inseparable for the funeral elegy, and that the former do not exist at the

expense of the latter, but in partnership with it. Here I return to one of David Kennedy’s criteria

for the traditional pastoral elegy in English – the pathetic fallacy of conflating human moods and

emotions with nature. All accounts indicate that this had a very real effect on Vaughan

Williams’s Pastoral Symphony and its elegiac disposition. In that sense the music had a real

landscape as its source of inspiration, which blended with actual experience. It seems appropriate

to close discussion of this work with a last remark from Fussell in the opening sentences of his

chapter on the Great War and the pastoral mode: “When H.M. Tomlinson asks, ‘What has the

rathe primrose to do with old rags and bones on barbed wire?’ we must answer: ‘Everything’.”225

222
Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 22-23.
223
Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral, p. 104.
224
Interestingly, Monelle chooses to cite the account of the bugle player in the camp given by Frank Howes, which
I described in an earlier footnote of this chapter. See Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral, pp.
103-104.
225
Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, p. 231. Fussell footnotes Tomlinson’s remark: “Mars and His Idiot
(New York, 1935), p. 11.”

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Postwar Songs

The search for further postwar music by Vaughan Williams that is specifically elegiac,

and that references pastoral themes, need go no further than the songs for voice and piano that

were published in 1925 but composed in the years leading up to that date. Most appear within

four major groups – Four Poems by Fredegond Shove, Two Poems by Seumas O’Sullivan, Three

Poems by Walt Whitman, and Three Songs from Shakespeare.226 According to Michael Kennedy,

the growing career of Steuart Wilson, the English tenor who had performed in Vaughan

Williams’s On Wenlock Edge before the war, prompted Vaughan Williams to compose these

songs for male voice and piano in addition to other works between 1920 and 1925.227 Kennedy

also mentions that Vaughan Williams offered Wilson lodging upon his return from the war,

during which he was injured to the point that his career was for a while in doubt. It is thus very

possible that Wilson’s return to singing after suffering injury in combat had some bearing upon

the aesthetic qualities of the songs.

Taken as a whole, this repertoire has received a relatively small amount of discussion in

the secondary literature. Where discussion exists, complaints about either the poetry or the music

have been common. This is particularly true concerning the Whitman collection (where the

music has been faulted) and the Shove collection (where the poetry and in some instances also

the music has been faulted). Still, by the measure of how several of these songs fit into the

pastoral elegy vein to be found in Vaughan Williams’s post-Great War music, and how the

settings bring out this quality in the poetry, they call for a central place in this chapter. I will

focus primarily upon the Whitman and Shove groups.

226
Ursula Vaughan Williams writes that these songs were shown to Ravel in the year previous to 1925 (R.V.W., p.
158). It must here be added that a stand-alone song, Vaughan Williams’s voice and piano setting of Walt
Whitman’s “Darest Thou Now O Soul” was also published in 1925.
227
See Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 152.

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 Before beginning an examination of the Whitman songs, it will be helpful to pause and

consider Whitman’s poetry and its intersection with English elegy, English Great War life, and

Vaughan Williams’s own experiences and concerns. In a chapter on Whitman’s post-Civil War

poetry, M. Jimmie Killingsworth makes the connection between the American’s elegiac poetry

and traditional English elegiac conventions, explaining ways in which Whitman drew upon them

in his own poems of loss.228 In the same writing he also points out how Whitman, in his most

famous elegy When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, never makes the complete transition

from grief to consolation, something that had been a hallmark of classic English elegy.

This pattern emerges in the works of other English and American poets around the turn of

the century. R. Clifton Spargo, in a book entitled The Ethics of Mourning, writes: “After

Wordsworth, elegists from Walt Whitman to Thomas Hardy to moderns such as William Butler

Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens continue to evoke pastoral scenes, almost perhaps as a

poetic reflex, but with perceptibly diminished expectations about the consolations they will

offer.”229 On its face, this notion would seem to militate against Paul Fussell’s point, quoted

earlier, that pastoral signifiers acted as mental comforts to soldiers during the Great War. But

Fussell also stressed the lingering presence of antithesis, allowing death and destruction a lasting

place alongside attempts at reflection and consolation. That the pastoral mode could and did

embody both in the context of the Great War was one of his primary arguments. It is also

important to remember how personal experience may modify larger patterns.

228
See M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.
57 ff. Plenty of other writers have discussed Whitman’s relationship to elegiac and pastoral tradition. For only a
couple of examples, see Daniel Mark Epstein, Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington (New
York: Random House, Inc., 2005), p 294; and Richard Adams, “Whitman’s ‘Lilacs’ and the Tradition of Pastoral
Elegy,” in PMLA, Vol. 72, No. 3 (June, 1957), pp. 479-487.
229
R. Clifton Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 225.

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 One may begin to see the renewed appeal that Whitman’s poetry continued to hold for

Vaughan Williams after his earliest works. In his music immediately following the Great War

there are signs of an intensified ambivalence that increasingly characterizes his postwar art, both

in terms of the musical materials and in terms of the aesthetic and programmatic themes coloring

them. This feature arguably reaches its peak with the music of his last period. In the Whitman

songs published in 1925, Vaughan Williams exploits the dualistic qualities of Whitman’s poetry

in a unique manner. The texts originate from two sections in the latter half of Leaves of Grass –

Whispers of Heavenly Death and Songs of Parting. This is among the poetry that demonstrates

Whitman’s deepening interest in elegiac themes during the years following the American Civil

War. As James Day stated in a brief paragraph treating these songs, death is the overriding

theme.230

Musically, the Whitman songs of 1925 are sparsely scored and unlyrical. In each there is

a recurring rhythm or bass pattern, and piano accompaniments are chordal and repetitive. These

ingredients are among the features that have led to criticism. Trevor Hold wrote that the

Whitman songs “are recognizably the Vaughan Williams of the time” but “lack definition and

clarity, and rely too much on the use of ostinato figures in the piano accompaniment.”231 Stephen

Banfield’s criticism of the group is similar. He calls the Whitman songs “disappointingly

opaque” and specifically faults the ostinato feature in the last song (though all adopt some form

of bass pattern): “it is as though the composer were trying to avoid the idea of closure, placing a

mystical emphasis on being rather than becoming.” He groups the concluding songs from the

Shove cycle, the Four Hymns, and the Five Mystical Songs into this category.232 Frank Howes

writes merely that Vaughan Williams’s “belated return to Whitman does not seem very

230
Day, Vaughan Williams, p. 115.
231
Trevor Hold, Parry to Finzi, p. 119.
232 th
Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20 Century Volume 2, p. 329.

109
fruitful.”233 James Day’s more neutral assessment provides an ideal point of departure for this

discussion: “The three Whitman settings, also published in 1925, are simpler still, as if Vaughan

Williams were seeking a kind of austere, self-imposed clarity of expression, underlining rather

than actually setting the words.”234 It is my contention that such traits as Day describes, and

others criticized, stand in better relief when they are considered in terms of the particular elegiac

poetry Vaughan Williams chose, the recent experiences of war that both he and Ursula described,

and the significance of half light and twilight discussed earlier in connection with that Great War

experience.

The first song involves many of the themes discussed. It is worth quoting the text here for

easy reference.

Whispers of heavenly death murmur’d I hear,

Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals,
Footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes wafted soft
and low,
Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of current flowing, forever
flowing,
(Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of
human tears?)
I see, just see skyward, great cloud-masses,
Mournfully slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing,
With at times a half-dimm’d sadden’d far-off star,
Appearing and disappearing.

(Some parturition rather, some solemn immortal birth;

On the frontiers to eyes impenetrable,
Some soul is passing over.)

One may see how the dualities in this poem adhere to patterns of juxtaposition between natural

imagery and human mourning discussed earlier in relation to the funeral elegy. In his musical

setting, Vaughan Williams matches both strands on a couple of levels. First, common to the

233
Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 240.
234
Day, Vaughan Williams, p. 115.

110
whole text is a sense of motion – in the footsteps, the images of rivers, the passing clouds, and

the migrant spirit. This, and the gloomily ponderous aspect of the text, may explain the use of a

matching ostinato, marked “Andante con moto” and “molto legato” in the piano accompaniment

by Vaughan Williams throughout the song. See the beginning measures below.

Ex. 4.3: Vaughan Williams, Three Poems by Walt Whitman – No. 1, “Whispers of Heavenly

Death”, mm. 1-8

The regular rhythm here may recall the very opening of A Pastoral Symphony, another work with

introverted qualities. The sense of even motion also recurs throughout the movement.

Ex. 4.4: Vaughan Williams, A Pastoral Symphony: Mov. I, mm. 1-5 (woodwinds)

Next in the song, Vaughan Williams captures the inward quality of the text – the feeling

that the poet is really speaking more to himself than to anyone else in particular – in various

ways. Most simply, the whole song is very quiet, never exceeding a piano dynamic marking. The

111
vocal line is to a large extent speech-like, rising and falling on language inflection and seemingly

not as concerned with melodic imprint. To these things one must add the fact that Vaughan

Williams shifts between directions for the singer from “parlante,” to “cantando” (staying here for

much of the middle portion), to “parlando,” and finally to “cantando” once more. This reinforces

both the impression of self-conversation and also that Vaughan Williams musically interprets the

text as such.

Finally, the harmony of the first Whitman song merits some consideration. Concurrent

with the quarter-note ostinato figure in the piano accompaniment are alternating chords and bare

intervals in quarters or halves in the vocal part. Though the opening suggests a D Dorian tonal

center, the harmonic course throughout the rest of the song meanders subtly, sometimes

matching the vocal line and at other times merely supporting it. Perhaps most noteworthy is the

final chord, created out of suspensions and intervals from the measures preceding, and made up

of nine pitches that do very little to offer a restful closure. The tritone that forms the last part of

this tied sonority is perhaps symbolically important.

Ex. 4.5: Vaughan Williams, Three Poems by Walt Whitman – No. 1, “Whispers of Heavenly

Death”, mm. 67-71

Both the music and the text seem little concerned with resolution and instead drop off in the

middle of the reciter’s sad thoughts. As far as this song is concerned, Banfield appears to be

112
correct in that the emphasis is very much on a “state of being” rather than on any convincing

denouement. But denouement denotes resolution of some kind. And, in keeping with the pattern

of Whitman’s downplaying of consolation, Vaughan Williams denies the listener a pure

resolution. Instead, he extends the mournful contemplation to linger into a harmonically tenuous

end. This implies continuance beyond the conclusion.

The second Whitman song is still shorter and more sparse. “Clear Midnight” is

essentially another nocturne concerned with quiet rumination on death. Once more there is a

repeating figure, this time in the form of a five-measure ground bass pattern, and once more the

dynamic never exceeds piano. Vaughan Williams’s score indication under each of the Seumas

O’Sullivan songs – that they may be sung with or without piano accompaniment seems like it

may fruitfully apply here as well. Bare triadic pillars underlie the melody, mostly in half-note

motion in the 3/2 time structure. The song winds down with the words “Night, sleep, death and

the stars.” They immediately precede the pianissimo close, where again some harmonic tension

emerges at the last sonority. This time, however, Vaughan Williams allows the listener the most

fleeting of resolutions, which may hardly seem like one at all given its bare qualities.

Ex. 4.6: Vaughan Williams, Three Poems by Walt Whitman – No. 2, “Clear Midnight”, mm. 31-

37

The final song in the group, “Joy, Shipmate, Joy!” represents a contrast with the first two

songs in nearly every respect. Though not strictly pastoral, the poem is relevant in Vaughan

113
Williams’s group both as a response to the earlier songs and as a continuation of their meditation

on death. The text ostensibly presents a welcoming of death:

Joy, shipmate, joy!

(Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry,)
Our life is closed, our life begins,
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last, she leaps!
She swiftly courses from the shore,
Joy, shipmate, joy.

This poem appears as a small stand-alone offering in the middle of the Songs of Parting section

of Leaves of Grass, where themes of death in war, mourning, and sunset figure prominently.

Whether or not Whitman intended this poem to be ironic, it is possible to discern some irony in

Vaughan Williams’s setting. The smoothly recurring ostinato patterns in the first two songs give

way to an almost frantic reiteration of a one-measure pattern in the third song that never strays

from its G-tonic position. Furthermore, the accent on the last quarter in the ostinato figure

provides an extra jolt. The rapid tempo only increases the effect. While it is true that the

dynamics sometimes fall to piano, most of the song stays at or above forte, with the final seven

measures sustaining a fortissimo before finally even reaching fff. The last chord continues to

deny the listener a pure major sonority, as is the case throughout the rest of the song despite the

single sharp in the key signature.

114
Ex. 4.7: Vaughan Williams, Three Poems by Walt Whitman – No. 3, “Joy, Shipmate, Joy!” mm.

27-31

These musical traits in combination with each other can make the words of the text seem hollow,

and the expression of joy forced or disingenuous. The singer might be trying to convince himself

of what he is saying.

The dichotomy of life and death in the group’s final song operates on its own level

poetically, but the effect in Vaughan Williams’s short cycle of “Joy, shipmate, joy!,” coming

after the kind of songs that it does, provides another dichotomy. The outward expression of joy

or false joy, however one chooses to see it, stands alongside quietly inward, and at times

mournful, reflections on death in a natural or quasi-natural setting. To the extent that the cycle

offers resolution in its final song, it is perfunctory and questionable as a source of consolation. In

several instances throughout the three songs, the poetry offers visions of potential comfort –

natural scenery and the prospect of an afterlife. But as the criticisms cited together hint at, the

music does little to openly celebrate them in any resolute or genuine way. Even if one subscribes

to the notion that Vaughan Williams was aesthetically earnest in his setting of “Joy, shipmate,

joy!,” one may deny that it acts as a complete counterbalance to what came before it. At best,

perhaps, rumination on death and brief outward anticipation of the afterlife merely coexist, just

as the poet and nature, and life and death coexist in the texts for each of the poems. In this light,

Vaughan Williams’s musical choices across the Whitman cycle accentuate well the subtle

115
elegiac themes of their texts, both in accordance with Whitman’s elegiac practices and with

respect to Great War modes of elegy.

Themes of life and death also coexist in the Shove poems that Vaughan Williams finished

setting in 1922 and published three years later.235 The aesthetic trajectory of the group somewhat

compares with the Whitman songs, with the first three forming more of a homogenous character

in comparison with a starkly contrasting final number. 236 Indeed, the first two songs of the

Shove group carry on many of the poetic themes to be found in the first two Whitman songs,

being concerned with the narrator’s introspection and a decided emphasis on nature. There are

musical similarities as well.

In “Motion and Stillness,” one finds another tranquil meditation, this time on clear

pastoral imagery and states of being. Mention of death occurs early in the poem.

The sea-shells lie as cold as death Under the sea,

The clouds move in a wasted wreath Eternally;
The cows sleep on the tranquil slopes Above the bay;
The ships like evanescent hopes Vanish away.

The bleak underlying character of the poem readily recalls the first Whitman songs. The musical

setting, though not as sparse, nevertheless similarly accommodates the text’s gloomily

introspective character. While nothing in the words explicitly suggests a nocturnal or dusk

setting, the musical accompaniment, particularly initially, shares something with another song

235
The poet whose texts Vaughan Williams set in this cycle, Fredegond Shove, was actually a relative of his first
wife’s sister. Shove was the daughter of F.W. Maitland (a noted music scholar and admirer of Vaughan Williams)
and Adeline Vaughan Williams’s sister Florence. She married the Cambridge economist Gerald Shove. Trevor Hold
questions whether Vaughan Williams’s decision to set this poet’s work (a poet he describes as having “modest but
real skills”) was motivated by family connections. See Hold, From Parry to Finzi, p. 118.
236
Each of the songs in Vaughan Williams’s Shove group come from the cycle of poems enitled Dreams and
Journeys. The four poems that Vaughan Williams set are interspersed within a much larger number of poems in
Dreams and Journeys and do not appear consecutively therein. Furthermore, the order Vaughan Williams selects
for the four texts in his group of songs is different from that in Dreams and Journeys. See Shove, Dreams and
Journeys (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, Broad Street, 1918), pp. 5-6.

116
that is openly nocturnal – “The Twilight People,” one of the two Seumas O’Sullivan settings

mentioned earlier.237 With both, initial alternating harmonic intervals serve to set the mood for

the text settings.

Ex. 4.8: Vaughan Williams, Four Poems by Fredegond Shove – No. 1, “Motion and Stillness,”

mm. 1-3

Ex. 4.9: Vaughan Williams, “The Twilight People,” opening measures

237
An interesting anecdote concerning Seumas O’Sullivan comes from Vaughan Williams’s friend, colleague, and
dedicatee of his Fourth Symphony, Arnold Bax (1883-1953). Bax, who himself wrote poetry under the pen name
‘Dermot O’Byrne’, spent considerable time in the company of Irish writers. His description of O’Sullivan closely
matches the title and character of the poem set by Vaughan Williams: “These were all regular weekly visitors to
Rathgar Avenue, but there were many others who would drift in occasionally, amongst them, Seamus O’Sullivan,
sombrely handsome and a subtle, crepuscular poet. His appearance brought to mind a comparison with a noble
funeral horse.” Quoted in Bax, Farewell My Youth (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), p. 97.

117
In “Motion and Stillness” the trend of a predominantly quiet and spatial dynamic also continues,

with the now-familiar pattern of an ending that very quietly fades and remains harmonically

unsettled.

Ex. 4.10: Vaughan Williams, Four Poems by Fredegond Shove – No. 1, “Motion and Stillness,”

mm. 19-21

With “Four Nights” the nocturnal theme is once again obvious, as is the narrator’s

musing upon nature and the cosmos. The narrator essentially relays the nature of his dreams in a

given night from each of the four seasons. Some striking lines early in this poem that refer to

spring speak to the impulse of finding peace beyond the waking world. At the end during the

winter portion, the narrator claims to hear or see nothing while dreaming in winter, even going so

far as to compare this state of sleep with death. In setting the poem, Vaughan Williams once

again opts for a soft dynamic throughout and assigns each of the sections its own accompaniment

figure. The opening may recall the use of consecutive major and minor triads in the very opening

of A Pastoral Symphony. Interestingly, the opening figure reappears once the text about winter

arrives. Given the pessimism of the texts at these points, the nocturnal setting, and the musical

patterns therein (triads and combinations of triads), it is tempting to recall like points in A

Pastoral Symphony.

118
Ex. 4.11: Vaughan Williams, Four Poems by Fredegond Shove – No. 2, “Four Nights,” mm. 1-4

In remarking upon the first two Shove songs, Trevor Hold is less than charitable, dubbing

“Motion and Stillness” “quite unsuitable for musical setting” and “glum and unmemorable.” He

allows that “Four Nights” is an improvement but that it “still fails to elicit a strong musical

response.”238 Interestingly, Hold identifies the next song in the cycle, “The New Ghost,” with

Vaughan Williams’s “preoccupations of his larger-scaled works of the period, particularly A

Pastoral Symphony and Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains.”239 Though this is undoubtedly

true, the implied exclusion of the earlier songs is problematic. To marginalize or downplay the

first two songs of the Shove cycle (and by possible extension the related Whitman songs) is, as I

have attempted to show, to deny a unique and important vein in Vaughan Williams’s postwar

elegiac music. Just as A Pastoral Symphony has been better understood within its Great War

context, so too may the bleak and difficult songs of the Whitman and Shove groups be

advantageously viewed in light of the conflict’s cultural vocabulary as well as Vaughan

Williams’s own experiences.

The poetry of the “The New Ghost” concerns the death of a man whose soul afterward

rises from the ground and follows the spirit of the Lord to heaven. (Because of the length of the

238
Hold, Parry to Finzi, p. 118.
239
Ibid.

119
poem, I have placed its text in Appendix C.) Some traditional tropes of pastoral elegy – death

upon the green grass, the mention of flower names, the birds, and the spirit of the departed

floating over the churchyard – are plain to see. As seen with On Wenlock Edge and other early

vocal works, Vaughan Williams’s musical setting of “The New Ghost” may lie at some variance

with the character of the text. Here we return to the matter of consolation in elegy. Reading the

poem by itself, one is left with the impression that Shove is emphasizing the mercy and comfort

of the Christian deity in light of a human being’s death. But Vaughan Williams, in keeping with

what by this time may have been his own agnostic outlook, rather enlarges the mystic elements

of the text in his musical setting, even if, as James Day writes, he avoids the obviously “grim and

macabre.”240 Day points to the poetry’s positive overtones in his remarks on the song. However,

the musical dressing often seems more conducive to sorrowful contemplation than it does to any

kind of joyful hope associated with Christ.

Much of the musical character in “New Ghost” may be traced to a small number of

harmonic imprints. The first of these is the use of a recurring enriched minor chord (in this case,

a clearly spelled minor triad with an added sixth tone). The listener encounters this straightaway

after the quiet opening of the song. Then another important pattern appears – the use of

consecutive minor triads.

240
Day, Vaughan Williams, p. 115. Stephen Banfield views the aesthetic of the song as similarly mystic is character.
See Banfield, Sensibility and English Song Volume 2, p. 329.

120
Ex. 4.12: Vaughan Williams, Four Poems by Fredegond Shove – No. 3, “The New Ghost,” mm.

4-9

Though this is a pattern that Vaughan Williams uses throughout his output, in at least one other

instance he employs it to color a text that describes a being in the spiritual realm. In his

Christmas cantata, Hodie (completed in 1954), the use of consecutive minor triads accompanies

the appearance of both the Holy Ghost and the Angel of the Lord, to Joseph in a dream. The

pattern there creates a unique tension that matches well with the supernatural beings and events

depicted. (I discuss Hodie further in Chapter 5.) In “The New Ghost” the effect is similar. The

lack of a definite sense of arrival combines with the inherent qualities of minor harmonies to

create a unique sense of unease in this song. This works more to highlight the eerie or deathly

elements of the text than to emphasize the religious consolation and love that the spirit of the

Lord clearly offers to the newly minted ghost.

A third pattern concerns rhythm. With the lines of the text that describe movement, the

piano accompaniment assumes a flowing quality that juxtaposes eighth-note triplets with

groupings of four sixteenth notes. The first instance of this occurs where the text paints an

evocative atmosphere of the trees shivering and the birds crying out at the sight of the new ghost.
121
Ex. 4.13: Vaughan Williams, Four Poems by Fredegond Shove – No. 3, “The New Ghost,” mm.

13-15

More consecutive minor chords appear with the meeting of the Lord and the ghost not long after.

When another area of rhythmic fluidity follows, the consecutive minor triads make another

appearance under some continuing triplets. Similar music closes the song. There the minor

harmony with an added sixth (mentioned earlier) ends above a high C and, in the words of James

Day, “reaches out to remoteness.”241

The final number in the Shove group, “The Water Mill,” stands out among Vaughan

Williams’s postwar songs in several respects. First, it is easily the most lyrical of any song in the

Whitman, Shove, or O’Sullivan cycles, with its firm Mixolydian grounding and its tuneful

melody that cycles throughout a modified strophic form. Second, the text is entirely of the idyllic

pastoral character, with no “Death in Arcadia” undercurrents whatsoever. (See Appendix D for

the complete text.) Both factors make “The Water Mill” noteworthy in Vaughan Williams’s

postwar art. Stylistically, it could have been written before the war and among earlier vocal

efforts such as the Songs of Travel. More than one commentator has called attention to its

Schubertian qualities, seemingly both from the standpoints of lyricism and subject matter – the

241
Day, Vaughan Williams, p. 115.

122
song readily recalls moments from Die schöne Müllerin though it lacks the final tragedy in that

cycle.242

The placement of “The Water Mill” at the end of the Shove group forms an obvious

parallel with the placement of “Joy, shipmate, joy!” in the Whitman songs. Both break with a

more uniform character shared by the numbers preceding them and appear, at least on surface, to

embrace a more upbeat aesthetic after much more somber and introverted music. It is more

difficult, however, to make the case that “The Water Mill” acts in any way ironically. One

strains, probably in vain, to see more than the charming idyll suggested by the text. There is no

death, but only the portrayal of mill and a simple family life amidst natural beauty. In searching

for consolatory imagery in Vaughan Williams’s postwar music, we possibly find it here, at least

to the degree that escapism is consolatory. If irony is to be found, one is compelled to look at the

place of “The Water Mill” in relation to its preceding songs rather than at the song itself (as may

be the case with “Joy, shipmate, joy!”). In choosing and placing these particular Shove poems,

and setting them musically in the manner that he did, Vaughan Williams obviously aimed on

some level for the dichotomy of hard and soft versions of the pastoral. He pits visions of dimmed

and/or death-tinged landscapes against a buoyant expression of an idealized rural scene. This

mirrors a similar pattern found throughout the other poems of Shove’s Dreams and Journeys,

which are predominantly concerned with death and pastoral life. In light of this, there is every

reason to suppose that Vaughan Williams chose his poetry with more in mind than merely

affection for, or obligation toward, a family relative.

One final group of post-war songs deserves mention, both in the context of pastoral elegy

and also as a direct point of comparison with pre-war songs set to poetry from the same

242
For examples, see Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 190; and Banfield, Sensibility and English
Song Volume 2, p. 329.

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collection. The cycle Along the Field (1927) features poems from A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire

Lad, but the differences between it and the pre-war On Wenlock Edge are considerable. In

keeping with the austerity in the collections just discussed, Vaughan Williams’s scoring calls for

soprano and violin only. The textures of this cycle are thus much more attenuated than those lush

and richly atmospheric numbers from On Wenlock Edge. The musical moods, also, are more

severe and befitting to Housman’s subject in the chosen poems – the death of a young man and

continued life of his former love amidst the beautiful countryside they once walked together. In

his life and works volume, Michael Kennedy underscores the stylistic contrast between the

cycles. He also cites a very telling review of the 1927 cycle in the Musical Times, in which the

reviewer remarks on the “severeness of style” and explicitly states that, in contrast to On

Wenlock Edge’s reception, “the composer has aimed at giving the poet the first place, obscuring

the verbal effect as little as possible.”243

The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains

When one looks for other large-scale postwar works beyond A Pastoral Symphony that

intersect with pastoral elegy, the most obvious choice for discussion is The Shepherds of the

Delectable Mountains (henceforth referred to as Shepherds in this chapter). In contrast to those

postwar works by Vaughan Williams in which the theme of consolation in elegy is absent,

doubtful, or unclear, here is a composition where consolation in the face of death is central.

Vaughan Williams dubbed Shepherds (completed in 1921) “a pastoral episode,” making another

one of his sparing references to the term “pastoral” as it pertains to a specific work. Like A

Pastoral Symphony, Shepherds is largely subdued and introspective music with brief surges of
243
See Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pp. 116 n. 1, 196.

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outward intensity. It is a stage work based upon relatively brief portions from John Bunyan’s

Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, a book that the composer cherished his whole life.244

In Vaughan Williams’s musical rendition, the wandering “Pilgrim” (renamed by Vaughan

Williams from “Christian” in the interest of spiritual inclusiveness) finds rest in The Delectable

Mountains, which one of the shepherds in his score dubs “Immanuel’s Land.” It lay within sight

of the Pilgrim’s final goal – the Celestial City – a representation of the afterlife and the final

resting place for weary pilgrims.

The degree to which Vaughan Williams makes various departures from the material in

the first part of Bunyan’s allegory is significant. For instance, he omits the companion of the

Pilgrim at this point (Hopeful), decreases the number of shepherds from five to three (and omits

their names), and places the Delectable Mountains scene directly before the Pilgrim crosses the

River of Death. In Part I of the book, the Pilgrim’s arrival at the Delectable Mountains occurs a

significant amount of time before the final crossing over, although still within long sight of the

gates to the Celestial City.245 At other points Vaughan Williams inserts Biblical verses and

dialogue from different parts of The Pilgrim’s Progress and modifies the text as he sees fit. This

is in keeping with his lifelong practice of parsing and rearranging texts at will.

Two of the largest modifications made by Vaughan Williams to Bunyan’s original

sequence of events in Shepherds deserved some focused attention. They concern both the extent

to which he enhances the pastoral ambience of the mountains, and also the Pilgrim’s fitful

preoccupation with death therein. Concerning the first, Bunyan makes it clear on multiple

occasions in The Pilgrim’s Progress that the Delectable Mountains are a place of comfort, both

244
Vaughan Williams’s final opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, carries all but the last part of Shepherds in the latter
scene of its fourth act. I will discuss The Pilgrim’s Progress in fuller detail in Chapter 6.
245
Part II of Bunyan’s book also features the Delectable Mountains, but in the context of the Pilgrim’s wife visiting
them when she embarks upon her own journey of salvation after her husband had already reached the Celestial
City.

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when the Pilgrim spies them from afar earlier in his journey while staying at House Beautiful,

and also when he arrives there some time later. Bunyan scholar Roger Sharrock points out, in his

edition of the book, that the author drew upon “the fertile landscapes of the Old Testament,

especially those in Psalms and the Song of Solomon.”246 But Vaughan Williams makes

significant additions, enhancing the setting as something of a God-protected, pastoral paradise.

The very opening lines of the work, sung by the three shepherds, are additions to the Bunyan

dialogue, being taken directly from verses of Psalm 91.

Whoso dwelleth under the defense of the Most High

Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty
He shall defend thee under his wings
And thou shalt be safe under his feathers
For he shall give his angels charge over thee
That thou hurt not thy foot against a stone

Briefly postponing a discussion of the following exchange between the Pilgrim and the

shepherds, I now point to the primary modification by Vaughan Williams that heightens the

Arcadian qualities of the Delectable Mountains. Here, after the Pilgrim falls into despondency in

refusing to gaze upon the Celestial City, the first shepherd states words taken from the end of

Part I of The Pilgrim’s Progress, pertaining to a place called “Beulah.” In the book, Christian

and his companion Hopeful reach Beulah directly before finally gaining entrance to the Celestial

City at the conclusion of Part I. Bunyan’s description of Beulah, as Brainerd Stranahan has

pointed out, derives from Song of Solomon 2:12.247 Vaughan Williams in Shepherds transplants

this description as dialogue for one of the shepherds in the Delectable Mountains – “Here the air

is very sweet and pleasant, here you shall hear continually the singing of birds and shall see

246
Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, edited by Sharrock, n. 48, p. 283.
247
Brainerd T. Stranahan, “’With Great Delight’: The Song of Solomon in The Pilgrim’s Progress,” in English Studies
Vol. 68, No. 3 (June, 1987), p. 224. Stranahan also explains how the name “Beulah” was itself taken by Bunyan
from verses in Isaiah (Chapter 62: 4-5) that speak of the relationship between a bride and bridegroom.

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every day flowers appear in the land.” Directly following this he inserts another Biblical addition

that emphasizes the Edenesque scenery – an ensemble song with Psalm 23 as its lyrics.

Yet even in that most pastoral of psalms, the “shadow of death” rears its head.248

Elsewhere at this juncture, the theme of death exists both in Bunyan’s text and in Vaughan

Williams’s Shepherds adaptation. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, the shepherds of the mountain help

Christian and his companion Hopeful, after they rest one night, by showing how former Pilgrims

have come to ruin in dangerous spots beyond the mountains. In Vaughan Williams’s work the

shepherds do no such thing beyond mentioning that “many will fall” along the path to salvation.

Instead, in Vaughan Williams’s score they largely comfort the lone Pilgrim and help him prepare

for his journey to the Celestial City. Most noteworthy, however, is how in Shepherds the Pilgrim,

while at the Delectable Mountains, expresses a dismay and anxiety about death that Christian

scarcely demonstrates at Bunyan’s corresponding juncture. In the latter, Christian merely asks

(as does the Pilgrim in Shepherds): “is there any relief for Pilgrims who are weary and faint in

the way?” For Shepherds, Vaughan Williams transplants dialogue that Christian had had with the

characters Prudence, Piety and Charity in House Beautiful, which, as mentioned before, took

place far prior to Christian reaching the mountains. The Pilgrim gives essentially the same

answer, but now the shepherds are the ones who ask the question instead: “What makes you so

desirous to get to Mt. Zion?” The Pilgrim’s response, “Fain would I be where I shall die no

more, in the Paradise of God,” speaks to the heightened restlessness that the protagonist of

Vaughan Williams’s work displays over and above that of Christian in Bunyan’s text at this

point. The music follows accordingly. The Pilgrim’s response begins a brief period of dramatic

intensity in Shepherds. This culminates in a moment of bitonal climax wherein the second

248
The “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” mentioned in Psalm 23, is actually a place that Bunyan creatively
incorporates into the narrative of The Pilgrim’s Progress. For a fuller discussion of this, see Chapter 6.

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shepherd finishes describing the glories of the near-at-hand Celestial City just as the Pilgrim

cries that he cannot look on account of falling “faint with desire.” The brief overlap presents the

most outwardly robust point in the work. Note in Example 4.14 the descending harmonic motion

in the bass portion of the orchestra when the Pilgrim interrupts the shepherd, and also its

similarity to the excerpt shown for A Pastoral Symphony in Example 4.1.

Ex. 4.14: Vaughan Williams, Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains (the six measures

following from Rehearsal 9)

The two largest factors that make Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains different from

Bunyan’s portrayal of events in The Pilgrim’s Progress speak directly to themes of elegiac

consolation and pastoral lushness that relate back to this chapter’s discussion. Here more than

anywhere else lies an example of Vaughan Williams’s postwar artistic preoccupations with death

in a pastoral setting – not merely in his choice of music, nor even in his choice of libretto, but in

his very specific alterations of the libretto to suit his needs. This suggests as well that his very

decision to return to work on a Bunyan project in the immediate aftermath of the war has larger

significance. Fussell records how The Pilgrim’s Progress was a book that English men had been

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brought up on as children, and how the allegorical events and places in it took on new meanings

for them as participants in the war. In particular, Fussell describes how concepts and places in

real life seemed to take on dimensions of Bunyan’s settings. The “Slough of Despond” (the mire

of the trenches), “The Celestial City” (demobilization) and, not least, “The Valley of the Shadow

of Death” (self-explanatory) are three examples.249 Indeed, there is ample evidence that Vaughan

Williams himself thought of Bunyan’s places and names in terms of his own life’s experience in

wider contexts than just the war. I will treat this matter more fully in the final chapter.

Flos Campi

In considering Flos Campi, I move away from direct focus upon a strictly funereal type

of elegy. Indeed, mention of this work in the context of Vaughan Williams’s postwar elegiac

music may elicit some surprise. My response to this possible reaction is twofold. First, there are

enough themes in its textual epigraphs that speak to loss, despair, and a lush natural setting to

suggest pastoral elegy. Second, while it may be difficult to tie Flos Campi to the Great War in

any empirical way, it is reasonable to view its aesthetic as flowing directly from A Pastoral

Symphony and related music, or, at least, as being made possible by works more obviously

associated with the war. In any case, to pass over Flos Campi in a study of Vaughan Williams’s

pastoral music would be to shirk one of his most singular creations in the mode. Not merely a

tone poem with programmatic inscriptions, Flos Campi is far removed from pastoral works such

as In the Fen Country and the Norfolk Rhapsodies. It is renowned as one of Vaughan Williams’s

most beautiful and yet most enigmatic works, and it could only have been written following the

Great War.

249
Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, pp. 137-144.

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 Flos Campi, completed in 1925 and first performed in October of that year, is a difficult

work to categorize. Scored for solo viola, wordless chorus, and small orchestra, it is often

grouped with compositions featuring a solo instrument. The music is divided into six short

sections or movements, each of which bears at its head a verse quotation from the Biblical book

Song of Solomon (also known as Song of Songs). The available manuscript sources occupy a

central role in researching the origins of the work. Byron Adams was the first to discuss how

annotations in Vaughan Williams’s personal copy of the King James Bible (Add. MS 63859)

suggest that the composer at some point planned a large-scale vocal work based upon the Song of

Solomon.250 When we consider Ursula Vaughan Williams’s remarks on this composition and

compare them to the annotations found in MS. 63859, a connection becomes highly likely. She

writes:

So, in Flos Campi, words were the starting point, episodes

from the Song of Songs. The viola with its capability of
warmth and its glowing quality was the instrument he knew
best, and he used it fully in the six sections that explore the
sorrows, glories, splendours, and joys of the Shulamite, the
king, and the shepherd lover. He added a wordless chorus
to the strings that accompany the solo.251

These factors together suggest that work on what eventually became Flos Campi went through

markedly different stages and began considerably earlier than the completion of the composition

in 1925. This and its particular natural themes and overtones bear comparison with the pastoral

music of the early to middle 1920s.

The title itself – translated as “Flower of the Field” – alone signifies the work’s pastoral

flavor and shares, at least nominally, common imagery with both the traditional elegiac and

250
Texts marked by Vaughan Williams in a literary source have gone on to appear in a composition in at least one
other case – his marked texts in a personal copy of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, some of which appear in his
full-length operatic allegory. (See British Library Add. MS 71123.)
251
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 156.

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Great War tropes of flowers on a field.252 The epigraphs that head each movement , in

conjunction with their accompanying music, further establish the Flos Campi’s conformity with

the hard pastoral pattern of lush scenery juxtaposed against angst. (See Appendix E for the series

of epigraphs.) Such a focus is something of a departure from the norm for this particular text,

however. Many commentaries on the Biblical book Song of Solomon stress, to varying degrees,

its sensual themes, its idealized pastoral atmosphere, and its “secular” flavor (the book does not

mention the name of God). In their own study and translation of the book, Ariel and Chana

Bloch describe it thus:

The Song resembles Greek pastoral poetry in its central

conceit – the lovers as shepherds in a setting of idyllic
nature – and its celebration of innocent pleasures in highly
sophisticated art. As in pastoral, the lovers exist in a world
of leisure and delight, untroubled by the wind and the rain
of a real shepherd’s life, a world conjured up by the poet’s
idealizing imagination.253

Vaughan Williams, however, goes to special efforts to find those particular verses in Song of

Solomon that illustrate or hint at unrest, places them at the heads of agitated musical movements,

and juxtaposes them with verses that speak to pastoral or romantic harmony in other sections.

The verse that heads the fourth movement makes an explicit reference to military force. There is

also something like an elegiac flavor in the verses that involve the beloved’s (The Shulamite)

dismay at the absence of her lover (Solomon).

The opposing forces at work in Flos Campi have perhaps lent to its reputation of being

difficult and/or mysterious. Even Vaughan Williams’s close friend Gustav Holst remarked that

252
The most famous poem of the Great War, In Flanders Fields by the Canadian officer John McCrae, became
emblematic of a whole genre of Great War poems that deal with flowers upon the battlefield and the tombs of the
fallen. For a complete discussion of this, see Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, pp. 243-254.
253
Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch, The Song of Songs: A New Translation with an Introduction and Commentary (New
York: Random House, 1995), pp. 25-26.

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he “couldn’t get a hold of Flos a bit.”254 Two years after the premiere the composer himself

wrote a program note for Flos Campi, attempting to address some misunderstandings, but

perhaps succeeding more in prompting further questions. The beginning of the note recalls how

Vaughan Williams corrected in print prevailing false impressions about another elegiac and

pastoral-themed work that was often misunderstood – A Pastoral Symphony.

When this work was first produced two years ago, the
composer discovered that most people were not well
enough acquainted with the Vulgate (or perhaps even its
English equivalent) to enable them to complete for
themselves the quotations from the ‘Canticum
Canticorum’, indications of which are the mottoes at the
head of each movement of the Suite. Even the title and the
source of the quotations gave rise to misunderstanding. The
title ‘Flos Campi’ was taken by some to connote an
atmosphere of ‘buttercups and daisies’, whereas in reality
‘Flos Campi’ is the Vulgate equivalent of ‘Rose of Sharon’
(ego Flos Campi, et Lilium Convallium, ‘I am the Rose of
Sharon, and the Lily of the valleys’). The biblical source of
the quotations also gave rise to the idea that the music had
an ecclesiastical basis. This was not the intention of the
composer.255

The indication here is similar to Vaughan Williams’s remarks in his letter to Ursula concerning A

Pastoral Symphony in that he denies for Flos Campi the unalloyed Arcadianism suggested by the

title. In this case, the emphasis is on the fortunes of the Shulamite and her lover Solomon. And

while the sensuality is palpable, we sense that not all is “rosy.”

254
Gustav Holst, letter to Ralph Vaughan Williams dated November 11, 1925. Quoted in Heirs and Rebels: Letters
written to each other and occasional writings on music by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst (London:
Oxford University Press, 1959), edited by Ursula Vaughan Williams and Imogen Holst, pp. 61-62.
255
Program note for Flos Campi, written by the composer for a performance in 1927, quoted in Manning, ed.,
Vaughan Williams on Music, p. 347. Ursula Vaughan Williams seems to affirm the notion that Flos Campi had no
“ecclesiastical basis” in a letter to Michael Kennedy. She writes: “I think Flos is not much mystical – but about R’s
most sensual-sensuous work.” She proceeds to cite the story of Vaughan Williams visiting and flirting with a young
woman at the time of the work’s composition. (KEN/3/1/7/29), The Michael Kennedy Collection, John Rylands
Library, Manchester.) The story has been related from the letter by Byron Adams elsewhere. See Adams, “No
Armpits Please, We’re British,” pp. 34, 41.

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 The case of the final movement is of singular interest for this discussion. Its music and

epigraph, “Set me as a seal upon thy heart” (Song of Solomon 8:6a), in the published score seem

to suggest a peaceful denouement alongside its predominantly diatonic musical language

grounded in D Major. In previous portions of Flos Campi, and especially the much-referenced

bitonal opening, Vaughan Williams uses rich harmonies and intense solo passages for the viola

that match well the unrest suggested by its epigraphs. The final movement, however, stands apart

from the rest of the work in terms of harmonic character and instrumentation, with the viola and

wordless chorus providing consonant outlines of diatonic scales. Yet there is one apparent

anomaly in the movement – the sudden return of the opening bitonal melody given by the

instruments that played it in the beginning of the work.

Ex. 4.15: Vaughan Williams, Flos Campi: Mov. VI (reprise of the bitonal opening)

Reasons for this sudden interjection, recalling the unsettled opening theme, may have to

do with a startling clue revealed by a late-stage manuscript of Flos Campi .256 British Library

Manuscript Ms.Mus.1584 (formerly Misc. Music Deposit 2003/22) presents essentially the same

work as that found in the modern score of Flos Campi. According to an accompanying note,

256
In 2006 I was awarded the Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowship by the Carthusian Trust. According to the terms
of the fellowship, I traveled to Charterhouse School in Godalming, UK where I stayed. From there I made several
research trips to the British Library in London, where I studied the manuscripts discussed in this section. I recorded
my observations in an essay that I turned in to the Carthusian Trust in agreement with the terms of the fellowship.
I draw heavily upon the content of that essay here.

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Vaughan Williams gave this manuscript to his student Elizabeth Maconchy during rehearsals for

the premiere in 1925. She in turn gave it to her daughter Anna Dunlop, who then donated it to

the British Library. It contains numerous small differences from the final version that do not alter

the work beyond immediate recognition. By far the most significant difference between this

manuscript and the published score is the indication of another epigraph that Vaughan Williams

apparently once considered for the sixth movement. Written in red ink and crossed out on the

page that begins the sixth movement in Ms.Mus.1584 are the Vulgate words corresponding to

Song of Solomon 2:15: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines

have tender grapes.” Numerous interpretations have been posited in connection with this

mysterious verse.257 Most speak to troubling or anxious themes. That Vaughan Williams had

apparently connected this quite different text with the final movement of Flos Campi before

settling upon the much more consolatory selection in the final version, raises the question of how

the composer actually conceived the music.

The obvious parallel to draw between the discarded epigraph and the sixth movement

concerns the interjection of the opening material discussed above. One struggles to find anything

else in the movement that could account for a dark verse such as Song of Solomon 2:15. Even

without the knowledge that the verse played a role in Vaughan Williams’s creative process, the

musical interpolation of the opening theme has a jarring quality and compromises our impression

of the finale as an entirely benign scenario. The discarded epigraph, evidently abandoned or

briefly entertained at a very late stage, further supports this notion. But when one considers the

verse he finally chose, one sees that Vaughan Williams trimmed his selection. Immediately after

257
For example, Gregory of Narek equates the “vineyards” with the Judeo-Christian Church, and the “foxes” with
Satan, who wants to destroy it. See Gregory of Narek, The Blessing of Blessings: Gregory of Narek’s Commentary on
the Song of Songs, with translation, introduction, and notes by Roberta Ervine, The Cistercian Study Series No. 215
(Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2007).

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“Set me as a seal upon thine heart” there are the words “for love is as strong as death” in Song of

Solomon 8:6. Vaughan Williams did not include the second phrase in any extant manuscript.

In this light, Flos Campi is a work not far removed from the pastoral elegiac concerns so

far discussed. The themes of absent love and intense longing, combined with lush pastoral

scenery and even direct reference to armed men (fourth movement) create a world that fits with

other postwar works by Vaughan Williams. Wilfred Mellers made this perceptive remark

pertaining to the martial main theme in the fourth movement: “Although the theme is pentatonic,

like so many non-Western melodies, it is also metrically rigid, marshalling spontaneity: so if it is

erotic as well as exotic it points, in macho patriarchalism, to the link between sex and death, love

and war.”258 The new information concerning the sixth movement also prompts the view of Flos

Campi as a work at a crossroads between postwar pastoralism and later developments. Its

dualistic conclusion foreshadows an intensification of musical ambivalence in Vaughan

Williams’s later music. This already becomes discernable in works such as the masque Job

(1929-1930) and Riders to the Sea, where darker musical and narrative factors similarly make

the appearance of peaceful denouements deceptive. Allison Sanders McFarland’s chapter-length

study of Job includes these penetrating remarks concerning its conclusion:

The critical difference is that the epilogue moves quietly

and unexpectedly to end on B flat, rather than the tonic G
of the introduction. Indeed the entire masque up to this
point generally revolves around G or, less frequently, the
related centers of C and D. The only emphasis on a remote
pitch occurs in the sections suggesting Satan’s victory,
when the movement is to the tritone relationship of D flat.
So the arrival at B flat at the end of the masque does not
fulfill a purely musical purpose; rather it exists solely to
delineate Satan’s interval of the minor third. Vaughan

258
Mellers, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion, p. 109.

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 Williams is clearly symbolizing the persistence of evil
even when all is seemingly resolved.259

Such a statement could also stand for much of the pastoral elegy that lies at the heart of Vaughan

Williams’s music from this time. In juxtaposing natural beauty with human death and suffering,

he musically portrayed not only his own mindset but also the feelings of a generation of young

men who had fought in the most terrible war the world had yet seen.

Conclusion

Through all of the music I have discussed here, several qualities shared between

traditional hallmarks of pastoral elegiac expression and Great War cultural patterns are

discernable. What is also clear once more, however, is the personal element that Vaughan

Williams brings to his postwar elegiac music. In his own engagement with the “Death in

Arcadia” mode, he treats both consolation and unresolved mourning, holding not only death and

pastoral landscape in the same frame, but also addressing both old and new elegiac responses to

death in ways that recall his previous music and speak to his diverse literary interests. However,

it is not merely a matter of studied assimilation. In the course of these reconciliations, Vaughan

Williams created a fresh aesthetic that was further enriched by his own experience, just as folk

song collecting and other formative activities enriched him in previous years. Prior to the war,

the extent of his actual experiences in the rural world largely amounted to leisurely sojourns in

England. In the course of his participation in the war, Vaughan Williams was compelled for the

first time to live and work in a pastoral setting that was the opposite of any idealized Arcadia. He

experienced firsthand death amidst natural beauty, and it is not surprising that like themes

259
Allison Sanders McFarland, “A Deconstruction of William Blake’s Vision: Vaughan Williams and Job,” in Adams
and Wells, eds., Vaughan Williams Essays, p. 42. Emphasis mine.

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saturate the postwar pastoral music from roughly the early to middle 1920s. Ursula Vaughan

Williams wrote that Vaughan Williams after the war “was also going back to discover how his

own invention had survived the years of suppression, wondering whether it could come to life

again or whether it was lost for ever, and if so, what he could do with his life.”260 This, however,

was not the extent of Vaughan Williams’s engagement with pastoral elegy. In the next chapter I

will examine how an aging composer once more took up the mode in a fresh manner, and in

doing so embarked upon a fertile productivity similar to that in the immediate aftermath of the

Great War.

260
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 132.

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 Chapter 5
Vaughan Williams and the Pastoral Elegy, Part II: An Oxford Elegy and the Post-World
War II Music

In this chapter I shall examine Vaughan Williams’s music through the lens of another

kind of elegy that, though perhaps discernable in other works elsewhere in his output, exhibits a

pronounced presence in the pastoral-related music dating from after the Second World War. As

an expression of dismay over a current state of humanity, elegy conveys nostalgia for a lost era,

often idealized, that is regarded as preferable to the present. In this discussion, I shall introduce

the issues surrounding the composer’s late music, move on to a discussion of how this second

type of elegy has figured in English literature, and explore how Vaughan Williams engaged with

it in one particular composition (An Oxford Elegy), while touching upon several others. Finally I

will offer some conclusions on the place of these patterns in Vaughan Williams’s output as a

whole.

From a technical standpoint, commentators have pointed to the unique harmonic and

timbral colors that Vaughan Williams’s late music exhibits, along with certain retrospective

qualities in style and manner.261 Although there is some ambiguity concerning where a last

period in Vaughan Williams’s career actually begins, there is much agreement that a

foundational inspiration for the new aesthetic proved to be the music for the film Scott of the

Antarctic (1948). 262 Michael Kennedy stated that the Scott music “pervaded Vaughan Williams’s

261
See, for instance, Hugh Ottaway, “Scott and after: The Final Phase,” in The Musical Times Vol. 113, No. 1556
(Oct., 1972), p. 961; and Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 347.
262
This ambiguity can perhaps best be illustrated through how Michael Kennedy handles the issue in his writings.
In the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Kennedy opens a section with the words “The last fifteen years of
Vaughan Williams’s life had an unexampled creative richness.” (p. 347). He then cites the completion of the Fifth
Symphony in 1943 as the point at which certain musical changes recognizable in the later works begin. In a later
article entitled “The Unknown Vaughan Williams,” in Proceedings of the Royal Music Association Vol. 99 (1972-
1973), pp. 31-41, Kennedy explicitly identifies “the final period” in Vaughan Williams’s career as being “from the
Second World War to his death in 1958” (p. 31). However, later in the article Kennedy cites the Scott film music as
that which “pervaded Vaughan Williams’s final phase, his last fruitful ten years” (p. 40). Apparently Kennedy either

138
final phase, his last fruitful ten years.”263 Hugh Ottaway and Alain Frogley, in some detailed

comments, likewise cite Vaughan Williams’s Scott project as being the musical and extra-

musical launching point for the last period of the composer’s career (approximately the years

following World War II), though they refer back to the Sixth Symphony (1944-1947) and other

earlier works in order to identify key precedents. Concerning the Scott music, they write:

It was a stroke of artistic good fortune that Vaughan

Williams was asked for that particular score precisely at
this juncture. The spiritual desolation of the Sixth found its
physical counterpart in the polar wastes, and the sense of
challenge and endurance was re-engaged by the story of
Scott’s last expedition. Moreover, whatever Vaughan
Williams’s reservations about the vainglorious aspects of
Scott’s enterprise, the human values represented – heroic
endeavour, loyalty, dedication, personal warmth – were a
timely corrective to the ‘ultimate nihilism’ (Cooke,
D(iii)1959) of the symphony. He soon knew that what he
was writing was no ordinary film score and that an
Antarctic symphony might well come of it. In fact, he was
achieving a reconciliation that would open the way for not
one but three more symphonies and would affect almost
everything he wrote in the very active ten years remaining
to him.264

Further on in this article they refer to a special progression from the Fifth Symphony, begun

immediately before the war in 1938, to the Sixth, and then to the Seventh (1949-1952). This last

work, entitled Sinfonia antartica, was based largely upon the film music for Scott of the

Antarctic. The progression, in their analysis, forms the “reconciliation” they referred to in the

last quote. They summarize:

…basically it concerns the fusion and transformation of

hitherto opposed worlds of feeling: the ‘blessedness’ of the

forgot that he had already delineated Vaughan Williams’s final period as occurring between the years 1945 and
1958 in his life and works volume (and even earlier in the same article as beginning with the Second World War),
or he considered the “final phase” as being different from “the final period,” or he considered any differences here
as negligible and allowed the ambiguities to go unaddressed.
263
See the previous footnote.
264
Ottaway and Frogley, “Vaughan Williams, Ralph,” in Grove Music Online.

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 Fifth and the nihilistic vision of the Sixth were resolved in
a tragic but resilient humanism. Thus the last three
symphonies share the same stylistic and philosophical
orientation and have a wider range of imagery than any of
the others since A London Symphony.265

The key descriptor is “a tragic but resilient humanism.” In a different article that focuses upon

the music of Vaughan Williams’s “final phase,” Ottaway uses the same phrase to characterize

the general aesthetic therein:

The prevailing tone of the final phase is that of a tragic but

resilient humanism. There is much that is somber and
grave, overshadowed, as it were, by the trauma of the Sixth.
There is also a wonderful, warmth, humor, a lasting
vitality, and a deep, inner composure which is really quite
different from the ‘serenity’ of the Fifth and The Pilgrim’s
Progress. The crucial point, however, is that none of these
qualities stands apart; the emphasis varies from work to
work, but the vision is unified, the ethos unmistakable.266

In this excerpt Ottaway puts his finger on a hallmark of the final phase and issues a well-advised

caution: while pointing out and recognizing even overarching patterns in Vaughan Williams’s

music, one must be careful not to claim exclusivity for them, but to recognize that they nearly

always operate alongside much else. Ottaway and Frogley affirm this in their Grove article,

emphasizing that “parody and ambivalence predominate at almost every level” in the composer’s

late period.267

The question of why the Scott story proved to be so compelling for Vaughan Williams

during his last years is an important one, especially as it relates to his final pastoral works. Much

hinges upon the aesthetic and philosophical themes that he associated with the story, and the

subsequent changes that it prompted in the composer’s artistic and personal outlook. The story

265
Ottaway and Frogley, “Vaughan Williams, Ralph,” in Grove Music Online.
266
Hugh Ottaway, “Scott and after: The Final Phase,” p. 961.
267
Ottaway and Frogley, “Vaughan Williams, Ralph,” in Grove Music Online.

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itself, which forms the basis for the film, concerns Captain Robert Falcon Scott, a Royal Navy

officer who led an ill-fated expedition in 1911-1912, hoping to be the first to plant a nation’s flag

at the South Pole. Upon successfully reaching their destination, he and his men found that a

Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen had beaten them to the goal. Discouraged, Scott’s

small group headed back, only to die of hunger and cold on the Antarctic wilderness about

halfway through the return journey. Vaughan Williams himself was at once inspired and angered

by the story, while much moved overall. Ursula Vaughan Williams, speaking now from her

firsthand recollections, describes his mood shortly after the time he was asked by Ernest Irving to

provide music for the film:

Pictures of the Scott expedition lay about the house and the
work was begun. Ralph became more and more upset as he
read about the inefficiencies of the organization; he
despised heroism that risked lives unnecessarily, and such
things as allowing five to travel on rations for four filled
him with fury. Apart from this he was excited by the
demands which the setting of the film made on his
invention, to find musical equivalents for the musical
sensations of ice, of wind blowing over the great,
uninhabited desolation, of stubborn and impassable ridges
of black and ice-covered rock, and to suggest man’s
endeavor to overcome the rigours of this bleak land and to
match mortal spirit against the elements.268

In a penetrating article on the Sinfonia antartica, Daniel Grimley places Vaughan Williams’s

ambivalent fascination with Scott’s expedition in a convincing wider context. He draws attention

to how the Scott story was seen by certain writers and audiences during the Second World War:

“The story of Scott’s expedition…became both prospective (in its strong triumph-through-

defeat-and-adversity trajectory) and powerfully retrospective, reminding contemporary audiences

268
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 279. By this time Ursula had been Vaughan Williams’s friend and lover for
several years. She was a frequent houseguest at White Gates, Vaughan Williams’s estate in Dorking during the war
and at other times. They married in 1953.

141
of their capacity for endurance at a comparable time of national crisis.”269 But for all its appeal to

the “British spirit,” the Scott story also struck an opposite chord with some British audiences as

it did with Vaughan Williams, creating an ambivalence which informs the latter’s music for both

the film and the resulting symphony. Grimley cites remarks of the literary critic Cyril Connolly,

pertaining to a spiritual crisis he perceived in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Britain, and ties

them to the darker side of Vaughan Williams’s involvement with the Scott story:

For Connolly, contrary to any supposed spirit of optimism

following the end of the Second World War, the prevailing
mood of the times prompted an existentialist crisis of faith,
which modern art, music, and literature could only begin
to address. “This is the message of the Forties from which,
alas, there seems to be no escape,” Connolly wrote, “for it
is closing times in the gardens of the West and from now
on an artist will only be judged by the resonance of his
solitude or the quality of his despair.” Elements of
Vaughan Williams’s response to the Scott myth in the
Sinfonia Antartica suggest a similarly pessimistic
outlook….this score exemplifies most powerfully the
spirit of angst articulated by Connolly and others.270

In another article, Michael Beckerman offers a summary of the fascination with Scott as it

appeared in the Sinfonia antartica:

In this case [referring to the ambivalence of Vaughan

Williams toward the Scott story], the symphony is not
simply to be heard as a paean to the heroism of man and the
massive power of nature, but it is also meant to be
associated with the bitterness of human failure, the
pessimism of dreams dashed, and the futility of fools
fighting the wind and ice.271

269
Daniel Grimley, “Music, Ice, and the ‘Geometry of Fear’: The Landscapes of Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia
Antartica,” in The Musical Quarterly Vol. 91 (Spring-Summer, 2008), p. 120.
270
Ibid, p. 143.
271
Michael Beckerman, “The Composer as Pole Seeker: Reading Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia antartica,” in Current
Musicology No. 69 (Spring, 2000), p. 59.

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 I shall further discuss the Scott phenomenon in Vaughan Williams’s music later in the

chapter as it relates to the afore-mentioned second type of elegy. But to better understand how

this kind of elegy situates in representative music from Vaughan Williams’s last period, one

must also examine its literary background. The previous chapter explained how commentators

have understood the literary concept of elegy to refer to mourning or reflection upon some sort of

personal loss, and how that loss usually involves the death of a particular person or group of

people. While this is perhaps the most common conception of elegy, it is not the only one. Some

scholarship on the subject has examined ways in which the central theme of personal loss in

elegy may find other outlets. John D. Rosenberg, for example, states in the introduction to his

book on Victorian literature and the past: “[Elegy] must, I believe center on personal loss,

although that loss may be of places or beliefs as well as persons, and the person may be

imaginary.”272 In his study of the modern elegy, beginning with literature from the Victorian era,

Jahan Ramazani immediately alerts us to its mutability: “Indeed, the poetry of mourning for the

dead assumes in the modern period an extraordinary diversity and range, incorporating more

anger and skepticism, more conflict and anxiety than ever before.”273

That such observations come from studies treating literature from the Victorian era and

after is significant. As I partially recounted earlier, many of those experiencing the drastic

changes wrought by industrialization felt more keenly the passing of long-standing traditions,

nostalgia for a rural life (either real or perceived) in apparent decline, and an unprecedented

sense of foreboding at what might yet come to pass, even as others felt exhilarated by new

opportunities due to urban and scientific progress. Certain writers from the Victorian period

captured the anxiety in special ways. To quote from Rosenberg’s volume once more: “The

272
Rosenberg, Elegy for an Age, p. 4.
273
Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago & London: The
University of Chicago Press), p. 1.

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Victorians who speak to us most urgently today thought of themselves as living not in an age of

peace or progress but, in John Stuart Mill’s phrase ‘an age of transition,’ caught between a

vanishing past and an uncertain future. Such an unsettled cultural climate provided rich soil for

the flourishing of elegy.”274 Among the elegists of the nineteenth century, certain names stand

out in this respect. In his study Rosenberg highlights the contributions of several and devotes

sustained discussion to writers such as William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold,

and Thomas Hardy. These last two names in particular have prompted plenty of discussion in

connection with poetic elegies as troubled reflections on past and present. I again quote

Ramazani’s volume with regard to Hardy (1840-1928):

In his elegies for the nineteenth century, for the queen who
gave the century its name, for the unknown soldier of its
imperial wars, and for God, who had been dying through
much of the century, Hardy mourns the passing of one era
and anxiously anticipates the arrival of another….Hardy
elegizes the death of a Romantic and Victorian aesthetic
and predicts the troubled emergence of its successor.275

Literary scholars have classified the elegiac works of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) in very

similar terms. Abbie Findlay Potts writes, “Arnold links the elegist with the problems of his

time.”276 Hardly the first to make such connections, John D. Robinson mentions Arnold’s well-

known elegy “Dover Beach” and its themes of dismay over the “departure of God” and the loss

of certitude.277 In a classic monograph on Matthew Arnold, Lionel Trilling offers some summary

remarks:

Like Wordsworth before him, like T.S. Eliot after, [Arnold]

wrote primarily for a small group of saddened intellectuals
for whom the dominant world was a wasteland, men who

274
Rosenberg, Elegy for an Age, p. 1.
275
Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, pp. 36, 38.
276
Abbie Findlay Potts, The Elegiac Mode: Poetic Form in Wordsworth and Other Elegists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1967), p. 263.
277
Rosenberg, Elegy for an Age, pp. 9-10.

144
 felt heartsick and deprived of some part of their energy by
their civilization….His poetry, on the one hand, is a
plangent threnody for a lost wholeness and peace; on the
other hand, it is the exploration of two modern intellectual
traditions which have failed him and his peers, the
traditions of romanticism and rationalism, and, moving
back and forth between the two strands, it is an attempt to
weave them together into a synthesis.278

I single out Hardy and Arnold first because Vaughan Williams knew and had a special

affinity for the works of both during his adult life, and second because their literature assumes

prominent places in key pastoral works from the composer’s last years. An Oxford Elegy is the

only completed and non-withdrawn work by Vaughan Williams to a text by Arnold. However,

the composer’s fascination with his poetry dates back more than four decades. A letter written by

Adeline Vaughan Williams (the composer’s first wife) indicates that he had set Dover Beach to

music in 1899.279 However, this work was withdrawn and is presumed lost. Not long after,

Vaughan Williams began and left unfinished a setting for soprano, chorus, and orchestra of a

favorite Arnold poem, The Future, which I briefly discussed in Chapter 3 and for which Michael

Kennedy has offered the approximate date of 1908.280 The next known attempt at an Arnold

work, An Oxford Elegy, had to wait decades to be realized, though ideas for an opera based upon

its texts had long lingered in the composer’s mind. Eventually, he decided to abandon this notion

and craft a shorter composition through his by now familiar habit of parsing and cobbling

different poems together. Ursula Vaughan Williams explains:

Many years ago he had planned an opera on Matthew

Arnold’s The Scholar Gipsy. He later realized that what he
really wanted to do was to set some of both The Scholar
Gipsy and Thyrsis and he had started to sketch this two

278
Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: Columbia University Press, London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd.,
1949), p. 79.
279
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 57.
280
Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 42.

145
 years earlier. There were a good many discussions about it
during the summer; when he had read the poems aloud they
made us both cry, for they are poems that are not easy to
read later than midsummer, as an almost unbearable
nostalgia for the spring burdens one’s heart. After using a
speaker for his Thanksgiving for Victory he thought it
would be interesting to try this again, but in a much
smaller, almost chamber, work. He cut and re-cut the
poems, ‘cheating’ he said, so that all of his favourite lines
should be in and I re-typed the script almost every
week.281

An examination of the poems that Vaughan Williams chose for this work, The Scholar-

Gipsy (1853) and Thyrsis (1866), quickly affirms the descriptions of Arnold’s elegiac poetry

quoted above.282 In writing The Scholar-Gipsy, Arnold drew upon a story contained within

Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), a philosophical and ecclesiastical

commentary. Glanvill’s account of the scholar gipsy depicts a student who out of poverty

abandons university life to seek his fortune elsewhere. The student eventually takes up with a

group of gypsies from whom he learns mysterious powers of mind and perception.283 In his

poem, Arnold adjusts the storyline. First, he emphasizes the lush rural surroundings of Oxford

that he himself remembered as a student there in the 1840s – the Cumnor Hills, Hinksey, Fyfield,

etc. Second, he adds to the scholar’s poverty a brand of disillusionment from modern life,

incorporating a decidedly nineteenth-century twist. Taking these two themes, Arnold then blurs

the lines between them, so that the morose reflections of the narrator concerning the scholar

seem inseparable with the landscape around him. In one way the scholar gipsy is the landscape.

He represents a world all but vanquished by modernity, a relic from a more wholesome time.

According to William Ulmer, the Scholar-Gipsy “establishes its protagonist as a celebrant of the

281
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 292.
282
For the purposes of easy reference and comparison, I have included the complete texts of both The Scholar
Gipsy and Thyrsis, as well as the adapted text that Vaughan Williams uses in An Oxford Elegy, in Appendix F.
283
See: http://www.kingmixers.com/Glanvill.html.

146
Cumnor countryside, and then contrasts his fulfillment with the restlessness of modern

society.”284 For Lionel Trilling, The Scholar-Gipsy is “Arnold’s great lament for the present.”285

According to John D Rosenberg, “the Scholar-Gipsy figures as the elusive personification of the

landscape” and as a symbol for “[Arnold’s] culture’s lost wholeness.”286

Thyrsis intersects on at least one level with the kind of elegy treated in Chapter 4. Arnold

wrote the poem in commemoration of Arthur Hugh Clough, a friend, fellow poet, and former

classmate at Oxford who died after a period of sickness in 1861 at the age of 42. Clough was

known at Oxford and after to harbor religious doubts and other feelings of disenfranchisement

akin to those felt by Arnold. When reading some of the lines of Thyrsis, one sees Arnold not only

mourning Clough, but sympathizing with his despair. In this way Thyrsis becomes something

more than merely an elegy for a departed friend and takes on the dimensions of Arnold

posthumously commiserating with him over the modern condition. In the words of Trilling:

“Memorial of a vanished youth and of a nearly vanished mood no less than of a vanished friend,

‘Thyrsis’ is probably the last-composed of Arnold’s great poems.”287 Trilling further describes

parts of the poem: “in many turns of phrase we sense Arnold’s belief that his friend’s despair and

death were acts of surrender.”288 Finally, in choosing the name “Thyrsis” for the poem and to

symbolize Clough, Arnold borrowed from the pastoral poetry of antiquity. The name itself

appears in the first of Theocritus’s Idylls, which is one of the first recognized Classical poetic

elegies, as the shepherd who sings a lament for Daphnis, another shepherd who died after

refusing to succumb to Aphrodite. The name of Thyrsis turns up again in the seventh eclogue of

284
William Ulmer, “The Human Seasons: Arnold, Keats, and the Scholar-Gypsy,” in Victorian Poetry Vol. 22, No. 3
(Autumn, 1984), p. 247.
285
Trilling, Matthew Arnold, p. 114.
286
Rosenberg, Elegy for an Age, p. 149.
287
Trilling, Matthew Arnold, p. 298.
288
Ibid, p. 299.

147
Virgil, this time as the name of a shepherd who loses a singing contest to his fellow herdsman

Corydon. In Thyrsis, Arnold adapts Virgil’s portrayal of the rivalry to suit his own purpose of

connecting the death of his friend with the onset of modernity, stating that it was “Time” (and

not Corydon) that got the better of Thyrsis, and that because of Thyrsis’s passing Corydon is

“without rival.”

The Scholar-Gipsy and Thyrsis make an ideal pairing not only because both share related

themes of a specific kind of loss, but because in Thyrsis Arnold makes explicit reference to “the

scholar gipsy” on multiple occasions. In essence he equates the figure of Thyrsis with that of the

scholar gypsy. As Alan Roper put it, both poems “are linked through their use of the same setting

and through the later poem’s explicit allusion to the earlier.”289 In one essay, Philip Drew

thoroughly outlines the case for reading both poems as “separate parts of the same poem,” stating

that Thyrsis is a “sequel and counterpart” to The Scholar-Gipsy.290 Thus the poems lent

themselves naturally to Vaughan Williams’s hybrid adaptation for An Oxford Elegy, making it

easy for the composer to keep or discard lines as he saw fit while preserving the mutually-held

themes of both writings.

As can be seen when comparing the poems to the adapted text in Appendix F, Vaughan

Williams draws upon roughly the first two-thirds of The Scholar-Gipsy for the first part of his

composition (with a brief interpolation from Thyrsis) and portions from Thyrsis for the second

part. He omits many lines and even stanzas from both poems, excising all references to persons

apart from Thyrsis and the scholar gypsy. (This includes Corydon.) He also passes over the more

detailed descriptions of rural vegetation, evocations of places outside of Oxford country, and

references to Classical pastoral characters and poetry. Most noticeable among the omissions,

289
Alan Roper, Arnold’s Poetic Landscapes (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 209.
290
Philip Drew, “Matthew Arnold and the Passage of Time,” in The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), edited by Isobel Armstrong, pp. 199-224, especially pp. 204-205.

148
however, are many of the lines that speak very sharply and specifically to Arnold’s despair

concerning his own perceived brand of modern decay.291 At first glance this might seem to tell

against the notion of Vaughan Williams writing a work in which the text emphasizes the kind of

elegy under discussion. But upon closer inspection, one finds that he retains enough lines that

establish the trope of mourning without overburdening his text with too many idiosyncratic

expressions that are typical of Arnold’s poetry but that do not lend themselves to the musical

treatment envisioned by the composer. It may be true that Vaughan Williams’s interest in or use

for elegy here did not wholly conform to Arnold’s and, as Oliver Neighbor has suggested, that he

did not share all of the poet’s particular concerns.292 (I will return to this matter later in the

chapter.) Let us now consider the composition as a whole more closely.

In discussing the second type of elegy, how it figures in Arnold’s poetry, and the

nostalgia that allegedly helped prompt Vaughan Williams’s choice of lines for An Oxford Elegy,

I return to the theme of time. The manifestations of this theme in text and music, in combination

with the pastoral associations for both, likewise constitute important unifying threads throughout

a work that joins seemingly disparate elements. Musically, An Oxford Elegy shares with other

late works by Vaughan Williams the quality of harboring allusions to musical fingerprints that

the composer had exhibited in earlier stages of his career, mirroring the subject matter of the

poetry. Simona Pakenham writes, “it seems as if, almost deliberately, Vaughan Williams had

chosen to compose a work that reaches back to the earliest of his moods and styles.”293 Michael

Kennedy agrees, writing, “it recaptures evocatively the spirit of his early songs and rhapsodies,”

291
Roger Savage discusses this briefly in his article “Vaughan Williams, The Romany Ryes, and the Cambridge
Ritualists,” p. 416.
292
Oliver Neighbor, “The Place of the Eighth Symphony,” in Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies, pp. 216-217.
293
Pakenham, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Discovery of his Music, p. 155.

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adding that though very little of Vaughan Williams’s music is nostalgic, An Oxford Elegy fits

this description.294 From its first measures, An Oxford Elegy upholds these observations.

The initial measures present a strong dichotomy, hinting at the ambivalence that scholars

have identified in Vaughan Williams’s last period. The first musical idea occurs immediately in

the shape of a short melodic fragment over a sequence of shifting intervals. This figure repeats,

beginning within harmonic sonorities centered around an F Major scale with raised fourth and

lowered seventh degrees, and gradually shifting briefly to an E-Flat centered area. A kind of tail

motive is then introduced, which eventually leads to an ambiguous cadence (mm. 8-9).

Ex. 5.1: Vaughan Williams, An Oxford Elegy, (Piano-Vocal Reduction, mm. 1-10)

This is not the first work by Vaughan Williams in which this opening music appears. As we have

seen how Roger Savage has noted, the material in the first ten measures presents a reworked

version of a passage in a much earlier composition, the “Orchestral Impression” Harnham Down,

294
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 359.

150
which Vaughan Williams began in 1904 and eventually decided to withdraw.295 The manuscript

score of An Oxford Elegy bears an inscription from one of the more idyllic passages from The

Scholar-Gipsy – “Here will I sit and wait, While to my ear from uplands far away The bleating

of the folded flocks is borne, With distant cries of reapers in the corn – All the live murmur of a

summer’s day.” The speaker enters with this text at three measures after Rehearsal D in the

published score, with the orchestral accompaniment revisiting the opening Harnham Down

material. The chorus repeats the text at Rehearsal E over a slightly altered restatement of the

opening ten measures. For the purpose of comparison, I supply below the principal theme of

Harnham Down.

Ex. 5.2: Vaughan Williams, Harnham Down Main Theme – first part (Sketch of an Orchestral

Impression, British Library Add. MS 57228, fol. 42)

As Savage further notes, there is at least one other indication that this seeming reference to

Harnham Down was very deliberate on the part of Vaughan Williams. It involves Vaughan

Williams’s younger friend and colleague, Gerald Finzi, who keenly noticed the resemblance

between the opening theme of An Oxford Elegy and that of the then long-withdrawn Harnham

295
The single surviving manuscript of Harnham Down is contained within British Library Add. MS 57228 as the third
of three “Orchestral Impressions.” On the title page, Vaughan Williams indicates that the work was begun in July of
1904 and completed in April of 1907. Of additional interest is that Vaughan Williams later quoted an earlier
impression in the set, The Solent, in his First and Ninth Symphonies and in the film music for The England of
Elizabeth. This is another example of early music reappearing in much later music (in the case of the Ninth and the
film score).

151
Down at the former’s premiere. Vaughan Williams apparently expressed surprise at being “found

out” thus.296

What occurs immediately after the initial measures of An Oxford Elegy further suggests a

deliberate intent to set the stage for the text’s elegiac preoccupations with a lost time. Here is a

reference to a pastoral work from his distant past pitted against some starker music more typical

of recent times. At measure 11 the wordless choir enters in the alto voice with a melodic idea

that resembles the opening gesture of the Sixth Symphony (1944 -1947).297 The harmonic

accompaniment assumes dimensions that very much heighten the resemblance. In the Sixth

Symphony the clash of F minor and E minor at the very onset is well known. In this area of An

Oxford Elegy there is a similar placement of minor triads a semitone apart, with the resulting

emphasis on the tritone. For several measures after Rehearsal A, the listener hears a steady

oscillation between A minor and A-Flat minor. Though admittedly the broken A minor broken

chord is enriched with the presence of a D pitch, its effect against the enharmonically spelled A-

Flat minor sonority that follows is palpable. Combined with similar motivic activity, this

harmonic feature, while not exactly like the opening of the Sixth down to every pitch,

nonetheless suggests a close kinship.

296
As Savage notes in his article, Stephen Banfield relates this incident in his volume, Gerald Finzi: An English
Composer (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), pp. 14-15. See also Savage, “Vaughan Williams, The Romany Ryes, and
the Cambridge Ritualists,” p. 414. I have discussed in past chapters how Vaughan Williams was known to have
made reference to earlier works in later compositions. Another anecdote supports the notion that the composer
sometimes enjoyed being surreptitious while referencing other music. In the midst of correspondence with
Michael Kennedy, the organist William McKie relates a conversation he had with Vaughan Williams about his
coronation Te Deum of 1937. He writes to Kennedy: “the high point of the afternoon [October 23, 1937] came
when he looked at me with a mischievous gleam in his eye and said: ‘One of the folk songs I used in it was —, and
no one has ever noticed!’ This story is spoilt because unfortunately I simply cannot remember the name of the folk
song; it was something like Tarry Trousers, but far more frivolous.” (John Rylands Library, The Michael Kennedy
Collection: KEN/3/1/54, No. 2.)
297
In the article by Roger Savage already cited, he mentions the Sixth Symphony by way of contrast with the
retrospection in An Oxford Elegy, but he doesn’t make any specific musical connections between the scores. (See
p. 416).

152
Ex. 5.3: Vaughan Williams, An Oxford Elegy, mm. 11-15

Ex. 5.4: Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 6 in E Minor, Opening of Mov. I (Melodic/Harmonic

Outline, mm. 1-2)

The reception history of the Sixth Symphony constitutes one of the best-known

speculations over the program of any work that Vaughan Williams composed. Many

commentators continue to agree that the music exudes a decidedly bleak vision and is at some

level a response to the Second World War, despite the composer’s angry denial that the music

“means war.”298 If one accepts the aesthetic resemblances between the music beginning at

298
For accounts concerning the reception history of the Sixth Symphony, see Kennedy, The Works of Ralph
Vaughan Williams, pp. 301-304; Roy Douglas, Working With R.V.W. (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp.

153
measure 11 of An Oxford Elegy and the opening of the Sixth Symphony, one may appreciate on a

whole new level its contrast with the very opening measures’ resemblance to Harnham Down’s

main theme. One could regard the music as suggesting a nostalgic window to the past pitted

against a more troubled present. At the very least, the juxtaposition at the outset of An Oxford

Elegy exhibits a decided clash of harmonic fingerprints redolent of opposite ends of Vaughan

Williams’s career.299 As such, the music demonstrably matches the relationship between past and

present that is a dominant theme in the text.

This duality recurs until the last section of An Oxford Elegy. In particular, the persistent

presence of the Sixth’s melodic motive helps to maintain a sense of unease, even in some

moments where the text seems to be preoccupied only with pastoral beauty. At Rehearsal G, for

example, Vaughan Williams combines traits of the two opening harmonic areas of An Oxford

Elegy, mixing the more consonant modal harmony with the semitone dissonance of this motive.

The choral statement of the text at this point – “All the live murmur of a summer’s day” – thus

occurs over a considerable harmonic tension that seems disproportionate to its immediate poetic

subject.

Vaughan Williams also manages to create like tension in other ways. For instance, when

the speaker enters with the opening lines of the text, he does so immediately after a musical

statement by the wordless choir, beginning after measure 11, concludes. The next musical idea,

14-15; and Byron Adams, “The Stages of Revision of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony,” in Adams and Wells,
eds., Vaughan Williams Essays, p. 1.
299
Hugh Ottaway remarks in his article on the late music that in Vaughan Williams’s final phase “his feeling for
tonal contradictions” was “at its keenest.” (See Ottaway, “Scott and after: The Final Phase,” p. 961.) In writing
about the Ninth Symphony, just a little further on, he also makes the perceptive remark that Vaughan Williams
“reached back through the Sixth to embrace (and modify) a familiar lyricism.” While the manner of the Sixth’s
opening clash of tonal centers a semitone apart was prefigured in the opening of the Fourth Symphony (1934), it is
something atypical in Vaughan Williams’s pre-Great War works (with the London Symphony being one possible
exception), notwithstanding the fact that the earlier music features plenty of its own harmonic character and
experimentation. Hence, the use of the term “fingerprints” to delineate patterns from across the composer’s
career.

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which Example 5.5 shows, coincides with the second part of the text, where the narrator rouses

its shepherd figure once more to take up his “quest.”

Ex. 5.5: Vaughan Williams, An Oxford Elegy, (from nine measures before Rehearsal D through

five measures before Rehearsal D)

The new idea at this juncture bears some strong associations. The 6/8 time signature, the

dance-like character of the rhythm, the drone-like quality of the ostinato (aided by the use of

fifths), the choice of oboe to play the upper line supported by bassoon and other woodwinds (this

is not discernable from this reduction score), and the flattened seventh toward the end all suggest

both musical pastoral topics and folksong. But Vaughan Williams makes subtle realignments in

the harmony along the lines of what we saw in the material following measure 11 (see Example

5.3). From its third measure, the musical idea in Example 5.5 begins to exhibit signs of the kind

of dissonance in Vaughan Williams’s musical language that especially characterizes the years of

and approaching his postwar years. The minor second clashes that result from the simultaneous

G and A-Flat, and F-Sharp and G, pitches and the bare tritones that occur shortly before

Rehearsal D are features quite unanticipated in the initial two measures, and quite at variance

with the largely consonant repetitions of most folk songs or musical pastoral topics. If this is not

a parodistic treatment of such manners, it is certainly a unique one.

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 The first part of An Oxford Elegy sets the scene around the city of Oxford, concentrating

largely upon the surrounding landscape and the figure of the shepherd who inhabits it. It is left to

the music to provide variety, which it does in the manners just discussed. The second part of the

work explicitly introduces the scholar gypsy, beginning with a section where the narrator seems

to blur the lines between his past and present. The speaker begins by discussing how “rumors

hung about the country-side” where the scholar was spotted in various places. Perhaps the most

striking portion here comes with the Lento at seven measures after Rehearsal P, where we enter

into a decisively contrasting section. Here the cellos briefly introduce a quiet lead-in melody as

the speaker shifts from rumors to his own eerie observations of the wandering scholar. The

material in question begins with this text:

And once, in winter, on the causeway chill

Where home through flooded fields foot-travelers go,
Have I not pass’d thee on the wooden bridge
Wrapt in thy cloak and battling the snow,
Thy face tow’rd Hinksey and its wintry ridge?
And thou has climb’d the hill
And gain’d the white brow of the Cumnor range;

As the speaker narrates these words, the listener hears the choir repeat a harmonic pattern

wordlessly at short intervals, almost as a means of accompaniment. The gesture oscillates

between minor chords a third apart (in every instance between B-Flat minor and G minor),

sometimes ending on a final motion to the B-Flat minor triad (where every instance of it begins),

and sometimes opening to a chromatic step higher on B minor. Under this alternating figure there

is a monophonic line that matches the B-Flat minor chords with G-Flat and the G minor

sonorities with a doubled G. In the cases where the wordless voices cadence to the

enharmonically spelled B minor chord (C-Flat, D, G-flat) on its tied half notes, the orchestra

responds in imitation, using this “B minor chord” itself as the launching point for an echoing

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oscillation of its own – B minor to B-Flat minor and back again. In this short secondary rotating

pattern the sixth falls out, but the clash between the minor chords a minor second apart provides

a uniquely unsettling transition to the next B-Flat minor starting chord. A portion of this pattern

may be seen in the example below.

Ex. 5.6: Vaughan Williams, An Oxford Elegy, (the four measures following from Rehearsal Q)

The brief entirety between Rehearsal R and Rehearsal S presents a simple but effective

interruption to the oscillating pattern just discussed and avoids strict repetition. Here the choir

drops out entirely and the speaker recites these lines:

Turn’d once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall,

The lines of festal light in Christ Church hall
Then sought thy straw in some sequester’d grange.

For the duration of this text Vaughan Williams carries over in the upper strings the B-Flat

octave, and at one-measure intervals twice punctuates this loudly with a D major chord sounded

by a larger portion of the orchestra. Here the D major triad collides with the flattened sixth tone

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of B-Flat, providing some continuity with the G Flat’s role as a flattened sixth in previous

measures. In his article on the Sinfonia antartica, Daniel Grimley describes precisely this sort of

harmony and its role in the music of Vaughan Williams’s last period. He calls the sonority of a

triad with an added flat sixth degree an example of a “troubled diatonicism” and points out that

this harmonic gesture “echoes throughout much of the music of his final decade and…becomes

one of the most powerful musical symbols in the Seventh Symphony.”300

The reader will recall their use of lean consecutive minor harmonies to color texts

treating supernatural beings in a pastoral setting in the third of the Fredegond Shove songs

discussed in the previous chapter, “The New Ghost” (1925). A similar use of successive minor

chords occurs in a work contemporaneous to An Oxford Elegy – the Christmas Cantata Hodie

(This Day), completed in 1954. In the second and sixth sections of this music the narrator

describes the angel of the Lord appearing to Joseph and then to the shepherds in the field around

Bethlehem, although in the latter instance the oscillation between E-Flat minor and C major, and

other occasional major chords, factor in as well.

Returning to An Oxford Elegy, at Rehearsal S the listener encounters one last B-Flat

minor/G minor rotation figure.This time, however, the very last B-Flat minor chord lingers in the

treble voices of the choir, past all statements of the flattened sixth G Flat in the orchestra. A long

silence ensues during which the speaker finally confirms what one has perhaps sensed in the text

all along and what the music seemed to so chillingly hint at: the wandering gypsy is a phantom

or figment of the imagination.

But what – I dream!

Two hundred years are flown,
And thou from the earth art gone.

300
Grimley, “Music, Ice, and the ‘Geometry of Fear,’” pp. 129-130.

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 So concludes another part of An Oxford Elegy in which the trope of time and the pastoral

mode dominate the discourse. Here the text blurs a former age with a present time by bringing

the spectral figure of the scholar gypsy into the landscape of the living world. It is interesting to

note that when the speaker recounts his own imagined (it turns out) encounter with the wanderer

it is amidst a wintry, anti-pastoral landscape (which in some ways recalls the frozen scenery of

the Scott music), where the scholar gypsy’s ghostly qualities emerge in great relief.301 Here the

speaker first imagines that he has seen the scholar gypsy, but then confesses that he must be

dreaming because he knows that the person has been dead for two hundred years. This is the first

of multiple arguments that the speaker will have with himself over the presence of the scholar

gypsy. By preserving this dynamic in the text, Vaughan Williams keeps intact a hallmark of

elegy as discussed in Chapter 4 – that of the mournful living refusing, consciously or

subconsciously, to give up their dead by somehow projecting them into the living world. But as

the work’s text unfolds, an additional dynamic presents itself. As mentioned earlier, Arnold’s

scholar gypsy stands for more than one man being mourned. He is also a symbol for something

lost that transcends one person or one time. In the rest of An Oxford Elegy, Vaughan Williams

not only merges not only the wandering scholar as a person (at once living and dead) with the

text chosen, but he also preserves him as an idealized symbol comfortably fitted between idyllic

past and troubled present.

I begin discussion of the final part of An Oxford Elegy with a return to material already

encountered. The nine measures leading up to Rehearsal T reprise to the music shown in

Example 5.5. This time Vaughan Williams employs the 6/8 music to serve a somber text as the

speaker reflects upon the final resting place of the scholar gypsy. The words would appear to be

301
The sharp pastoral/anti-pastoral contrast in An Oxford Elegy recalls a similar Arcadian atmosphere that turns
menacing in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony of 1808, subtitled “Pastoral.” In that work, the penultimate, “Storm”
movement acts as a counterbalance to the idyllic descriptions that Beethoven provided for the other movements.

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a conscious reference on the part of Arnold to a recurring trope in English pastoral elegies – that

of the rural church graveyard.302

Long since and in some quiet churchyard laid -

Some country nook, where o’er thy unknown grave
Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave –
Under a dark, red-fruited yew-tree’s shade.

This continues the vein of the speaker attempting to convince himself that the scholar gypsy is

dead. But then as he recites the next lines over a D-Flat minor chord he seems to change his mind

again, and we as listeners begin to doubt whether or not the person discussed is a fixed being in

the speaker’s mind.

No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours,

Thou waitest for the spark from Heaven! and we,
Ah, do not we, Wanderer, await it too?

The phrase “spark from heaven” is a rare documented case where Vaughan Williams

took some issue with Arnold’s texts and where the composer’s convictions thus seem to diverge

somewhat from the poet’s. In a tribute written in 1955 to Jean Sibelius, Vaughan Williams

mentions it in connection with his own views concerning a composer’s work habits and craft. He

writes: “The Scholar Gypsy was always waiting for the spark from Heaven to fall, but it never

fell: and why? Because he was waiting for it.”303 Of further interest is the fact that Vaughan

Williams took three non-consecutive lines from across four stanzas of The Scholar-Gipsy, none

of which appear consecutively, and connected them to form the sequence seen above. The phrase

“the spark from heaven” appears at the head of the eighteenth stanza, with the closing line “Ah,

do not we, Wanderer, await it too?” In between there is much omitted text that speaks to strongly

302
In particular, the poem by Thomas Gray “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” gained considerable popularity
when it was published in 1751, and it continued to exert influence on writers in years after. Both Arnold and
Vaughan Williams would surely have been familiar with it.
303
Vaughan Williams, “Sibelius (1865-1957) (A tribute written on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday),” in
National Music and Other Essays, pp. 261-264. See p. 263.

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despondent themes of alienation and the inability to move forward due to the malaise of the age.

(See Appendix F.) Vaughan Williams’s exclusion of these lines allows him to preserve balance

by avoiding text that is too peculiar to its author. Why he decided to include the two mentions in

The Scholar Gypsy of waiting for “the spark from heaven” when he expressed ambivalence

toward the phrase is uncertain. This is another example of how difficult it can be to discern how

or to what extent Vaughan Williams personally valued the texts he chose for his music.

What occurs next suggests a despair that Vaughan Williams connected with the hanging

question just discussed, in contrast to the lack of personal sympathy he expressed for it in print.

A new key signature of four sharps (centered loosely around C-Sharp minor) and a new tempo

heading (“Largo sostenuto”) usher in a short quasi-fugal section without text. Here the wordless

voices, beginning in the bass, introduce a short melodic idea that is shuffled throughout the choir,

with the orchestra gradually adding to the texture. The music eventually reaches a dynamic and

textural peak with another repeated idea, once more making use of minor harmonies a third apart

from each other. The build-up ends abruptly one measure prior to Rehearsal V, where the

speaker reenters and the composition henceforth draws its spoken lines solely from Thyrsis.

Some apparent textual discontinuity follows. The speaker recalls that he had visited the pastoral

country around Oxford with Thyrsis in former days, apparently forgetting that Thyrsis has been

dead for centuries. The fugal textures begin again at Rehearsal V, only to die away six measures

later to the speaker’s gloomy pronouncement: “We still had Thyrsis then.”

Up to this point the role of the pastoral scenery in the text has functioned rather passively.

This changes with the arrival of an important literary symbol in the next section – the elm tree on

the hill. This presents an explicit link between the person of the scholar gypsy and the landscape,

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deepening the mutual abstraction of a man melding with the countryside on one hand, and

elements of the countryside assuming metaphysical properties on the other.

Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm,

Up past the wood, to where the elm-tree crowns
The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames?
The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs,
The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames?-
That signal elm-tree bright
Against the west,- I miss it! Is it gone?
We prized it dearly while it stood, we said,
Our friend the Scholar-Gipsy, was not dead;
While the tree lived, he in these fields lived on

The most agitated section of the work follows beginning three measures before Rehearsal X. It

corresponds with the text included by Vaughan Williams that most suggests Arnoldian angst

over a modern world: “Needs must I, with heavy heart / Into the world and wave of men depart.”

Here the wordless choir in four parts joins in a loud series of descending minor second motives,

characterized by a “long-short” rhythmic pattern. Before the choir expounds upon this idea the

music arrives at – once again – a cadence to an enriched minor triad.

Ex. 5.7: Vaughan Williams, An Oxford Elegy (from three measures before to two measures after

Rehearsal X)

After the conclusion of this line and the choral passage that follows, Rehearsal Y arrives with the

text “The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I, go I!” Another abrupt change follows

featuring a lengthy section of text that muses upon the pastoral world. The speaker recedes for a

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while and the upper voices of the choir assume the text, describing a variety of floral life that

will soon bloom, over a series of march-like quarter pulses. Here one may sharply recall Ursula

Vaughan Williams’s remarks concerning the nostalgia that comes with the passing of spring, and

how she connected this with the genesis of An Oxford Elegy.

The next section presents the most elegiac text to be found in An Oxford Elegy, featuring

among other lines: “But Thyrsis never more we swains shall see.” At Rehearsal FF, the voices

echo the words “Never more,” the orchestra alights upon a quiet D pedal point, and the inner

instrumental voices ebb and flow between F natural and F sharp, blurring the harmonic

framework. The continued ambiguity between major and minor intervals occurring

simultaneously with texts signifying despair or mourning is by now thoroughly established.

While this is happening, the speaker concludes the text which he had begun as the choir’s “never

more” repetitions finish their course.

Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour

In the old haunt, and find our tree-topp’d hill.
I know these slopes, who knows them if not I?-
But many a dingle on the loved hill-side,
With thorns once studded, old, white-blossom’d trees,
Where thick cowslips grew, and far descried,
High tower’d the spikes of purple orchises,
Hath since our day put by
The coronals of that forgotten time.
They are gone, and thou art gone as well.

Once more the speaker’s lines make the connection between the no-longer-present scholar gypsy

and the former landscape that they both remembered, including another reference to the tree on

the hill (which will later attain a special significance). With text such as “the coronals of that

forgotten time,” one notices that more is being mourned than the gypsy, whoever or whatever he

may embody in disparate instances.

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 Another musical burst of grief follows with another new section, six measures after

Rehearsal FF, and it presents another rare case of the choir singing text.

Yes, thou art gone! thou art gone!

And round me too the night
In ever nearing circle weaves her shade.
I see her veil draw soft across the day.
And long the way appears which seem’d so short

An airy section centered loosely around E Major, where the text (once again sung by the choir)

makes a fleeting reference to a “throne of Truth” on the “mountain tops,” follows and the

speaker is left yet again with grief over the departure of Thyrsis. Obviously the pessimistic

Arnold considered the place to be a mythical destination where Thyrsis has gone, for the speaker

once again enters with the text “There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here. Sole in these

fields.” The soothing triplet harmonies to which the choir sang about the mountain tops and the

throne of truth give way to a lone A-Flat minor triad on a dotted half note.

This A-Flat minor triad works as perhaps the most crucial pivot in the entire work. With

few exceptions, the composition up to this point has been dominated by nostalgia and mourning.

In the music immediately leading up to this juncture the grief and mourning in the adapted text

reaches a high pitch, eventually coming to rest on this sullen A-Flat minor chord. However, a

significant turning point arrives when the speaker utters the simple phrase “Yet I will not

despair” as the sonority expires. The next measure introduces the largest and last homogenous

section of the work. Another triad, this time a tied A minor chord in the orchestra, serves as a

starting point for the next text given by the speaker and the music that follows.

Despair I will not, while I yet descry

That lonely Tree against the western sky.
Fields where soft sheep from cages pull the hay,
Woods with anemones in flower till May,

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 Know him a wanderer still.

The tree on the hill returns as a hopeful symbol, and this time the music seems to support it as

such more convincingly than before. The whole section, under the heading of “Largo” and the

tonal center of F major, is of a hymn-like texture and character. This is a further case of Vaughan

Williams adding yet another stylistic musical flavor of decades past to An Oxford Elegy. Almost

as soon as the speaker begins reciting the lines above, the choir begins humming (directed to do

so with the marking “closed lips”) a melody in near-unison over a chordal and largely diatonic

accompaniment in the orchestra.

Ex. 5.8: Vaughan Williams, An Oxford Elegy (from seven measures before Rehearsal KK into

three measures before Rehearsal KK)

The choir begins to chant the words “Roam on!” just after Rehearsal KK. The speaker seems to

refer to them as the voice of wandering gypsy – “Then let in thy voice a whisper often come to

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chase fatigue and fear.” At Rehearsal LL the choir drops out entirely and the speaker recites his

last lines to the choral-like accompaniment of the orchestra.

Why faintest thou? I wander’d till I died.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.

The choir then sings these lines to the same melody with which they began the section on closed

lips. As they finish and An Oxford Elegy comes to an end we hear once more in the orchestra the

very first theme, taken from Harnham Down.

I have discussed the major events in this last stage of An Oxford Elegy at length for the

purpose of illustrating several important patterns. First, the outbursts of grief over the departure

of the scholar gypsy, once the speaker finally determines that he has indeed passed on, provide

fodder for some of the most dramatic moments of the work while showcasing the text’s primary

engagement with conventional elegiac mourning. Second, the emphasis on the cycle of seasons

in the pastoral scenery facilitates the text’s eventual equation of the scholar gypsy himself with

the timelessness of the countryside, and in particular with the “signal elm.” This reinforces a

primary trait of our second type of elegy – the mourning of time-related subjects adjoining and

yet distinct from particular persons. That Vaughan Williams chose to include lines from the

poems specifically mourning past settings and eras – “they are gone, and thou art gone as well,”

etc. – reinforces these connections.

Finally, the theme of renewal and the refusal to succumb wholly to despair is the poetic

subject matter that closes the work. As Oliver Neighbour has pointed out, Vaughan Williams

places the words from Thyrsis “Yet I will not despair: Despair I will not” almost at the very

end.304 In Arnold’s poem, the very last words (concerning the scholar still roaming the

304
Oliver Neighbour, “The Place of the Eighth Symphony,” in Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies, p. 227, n. 37.

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countryside) occur some four stanzas after the text mentioning despair. Vaughan Williams thus

made a conscious decision to finish his composition with lines that resist despair and

immediately point toward the tree on the hill as a sign of hope and renewal. In Arnold’s poem

the lines do not appear together, and they also contain some text that Vaughan Williams omits.

The effect is different in the original poetry than it is in the composer’s adaptation. (Once more,

see Appendix F.) One cannot help but notice the similarity between this situation and the Scott

myth. In An Oxford Elegy, as in the music that resulted from Scott film project, one senses the

ambivalence that Ottaway, Beckerman, and others have identified with the art of Vaughan

Williams’s final phase. In An Oxford Elegy dismay over loss exists directly alongside hope for

restoration. In contrast to the tension of the music that comes before “despair I will not,” the

music ends with hymn-like, major mode materials, with the Harnham Down theme recurring at

the very conclusion. The Scott compositions end with vindication after tragedy. An Oxford Elegy

ends with hope after tragedy. The broader pattern is unmistakably similar.

What makes the pastoral aspects special in this work are the ways in which they conform

to and enrich the different elegiac aspects of the text. Where the pastoral mode must evoke

nostalgia, it does so by connecting the character and rural qualities of a place with that of

remembrance of a person or idea lost. Where the need to provide imagery for loss and mourning

arises, including personal loss, it does so in areas such as after Rehearsal Y with metaphors such

as “The bloom is gone and with the bloom go I.” Where Vaughan Williams calls upon it to

signify renewal and the reaffirmation of an idea, it provides the symbol of the elm tree that

stands as a beacon to those who would follow in the footsteps of the scholar gypsy. Where it

suggests a sense of timelessness that encompasses the whole work – text and music – it fills the

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need with references to the seemingly endless cycle of nature, such as the descriptions of the

plant life in season around Rehearsal Z. It even makes an appearance in its “evil twin” guise, the

anti-pastoral, in the Lento section shortly after Rehearsal P. Here, as discussed, the speaker spies

the ghostly figure on the bridge, battling with the snow on the wintry ridge that is at odds with

the lush descriptions of the rest of the text but that deftly matches the sense of fear and mystery

connected with the supernatural. This “ghost” and the ghostlike effect of the wordless voices,

brings strongly to mind the fragments of the past as they intrude upon the present.

The pastoral mode thus has a pan-chronic quality in An Oxford Elegy that distinguishes it

from the elegiac works immediately following the Great War. This is matched by the

retrospective quality of the work, wherein Vaughan Williams employs styles, allusions, and even

direct references from various earlier compositions. This is something that, by comparison, is

largely missing in the “visionary” style after the Great War, where the focus is on new horizons

of expression and where the pastoral mode relates in large part to more immediate elegiac

themes. In some cases, I have touched upon the musical kinship of portions of An Oxford Elegy

with the Sixth Symphony and other later works by Vaughan Williams. This also sets it apart

from earlier music. In the words of Hugh Ottaway, “Of all the works by Vaughan Williams that

might properly be described as “pastoral,” surely [An Oxford Elegy], after the Pastoral

Symphony, is the richest and most rewarding. And for all its ‘reminiscences’, it could only have

been written in the last ten years.”305

Some further questions remain. What was Vaughan Williams “after” in composing An

Oxford Elegy and using the texts he did? How does this relate to his continued and increasingly

mutable use of the pastoral mode? One early reviewer, Ernest Newman, confessed himself to be

305
Ottaway, “Scott and after: The Final Phase,” p. 962.

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perplexed in the course of asking similar questions. He finally decided that articulating an

overriding “gist” for An Oxford Elegy constitutes an elusive venture.

I am left with the feeling that the scheme of this libretto, as

we may call it, must have an inner unity that is valid for
[Vaughan Williams] but not self-evident to the rest of
us.…Nor do I quite grasp the meaning of the “Elegy” of the
title: an elegy for whom or what? I find myself asking. We
must accept Vaughan Williams’s poetic structure, then, as
it is and wait for further illumination of his general
purpose, hoping also that the music will captivate the
listener on its own account and that he will not ask too
many questions as to the philosophical or personal purport
of it all.306

It will perhaps not escape the reader that Newman allowed himself the liberty of questioning “the

personal purport of it all” before discouraging others to do the same. However that may be, I will

offer my own answer after considering the thoughts of some other commentators.

There has been ongoing discussion as to a possible impetus behind An Oxford Elegy apart

from Newman’s musings. Roger Savage argues similarly to what I have offered here. He

suggests the possibility that Vaughan Williams returned to the Arnold poems later in life because

“the omnipresence of death in 1939-45 may have brought the earlier deaths of close artist friends

into especial relief.” Further on, he makes connections to other artists after the war who shared

with him a desire to reassert “remembered values and symbols.” Savage thus makes reference to

both kinds of elegy that I have discussed and ties them into An Oxford Elegy. He further

postulates that Vaughan Williams saw this work as artistically distinct from the Sixth Symphony

because the composer omitted lines that describe a particular “modern malaise” that he (Savage)

connects with the Sixth: “he could have felt he had already done justice to that malaise in the

306
Ernest Newman, “An Oxford Elegy,” in The Sunday Times, April 12, 1953. It is interesting to note that, in a letter
to Michael Kennedy, Vaughan Williams regarded this article by Newman as being a case of “wanting to show how
much he knows about the poetry.” See Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, p. 523.

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symphony, which he finished in the same year, 1947, that he started the Elegy.”307 However, if

what I argued earlier is valid, the Sixth is perhaps not so far from An Oxford Elegy after all.

Indeed the two works are aesthetically related. I will further address this matter nearer to the

conclusion of the chapter.

Peter Pirie sees the work primarily in terms of a real mourned person, making the

intriguing suggestion that the work is an elegy for Gustav Holst.308 Certainly such a connection is

possible, and at least partially probable. Vaughan Williams’s and Holst’s close friendship is

well-known. It is also true that Holst shared with Vaughan Williams much of the same

enthusiasm for England’s folk music and countryside. Holst had a particular fondness for the

countryside of the Cotswolds in western England, even composing a symphony bearing the

name. As we saw in Chapter 3, Holst and Vaughan Williams also espoused some similar cultural

and political ideals at various points throughout their lives. These facts seem to correlate with

Vaughan Williams’s use of lines in An Oxford Elegy that speak to the death of a wanderer who

shared the rememberer’s passions. However, the sense that the inspiration behind An Oxford

Elegy runs broader than merely Holst, as close as the two men were, is difficult to put aside when

one considers certain circumstances. First, for Vaughan Williams to begin composing an elegy

for Holst beginning in 1947, when Holst died in 1934, may seem a chronological stretch. Still

more, it would be unusual for Vaughan Williams to write a work that was supposedly to be in

memory and honor of his old friend, while not divulging this in any way to anyone, even Holst’s

daughter Imogen Holst (who was close to Vaughan Williams), or his own wife Ursula, to whom

he revealed much else. There appears to be no evidence that either of them ever made mention of

such a connection. This is not to say that Vaughan Williams did not connect Holst with the work

307
Savage, “Vaughan Williams, the Romany Ryes, and the Cambridge Ritualists,” pp. 414-416.
308
Peter J. Pirie, “Choral,” in The Musical Times, Vol. 124, No. 1685, Anglo-American Issue (July, 1983), p. 434.

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at all. It is likely enough that Holst played some role in Vaughan Williams’s creative conception

of the music. But it seems doubtful that the connection was preeminent in the sense that Vaughan

Williams was doing for Holst what Arnold openly did for Clough in writing Thyrsis.

Similarly, An Oxford Elegy does not well accommodate a specific linear narrative for

multiple reasons First, as we have seen, Arnold’s original poems give little or no sense of a clear

progression of events. Second, Vaughan Williams’s text parsings present virtually

insurmountable discontinuities. As I have shown, it is often all too clear that he was willing to

sacrifice narrative clarity by lifting lines out of their original contexts or changing their emphases

as he saw fit. These difficulties effectively confound attempts to ‘read between the lines’ or

convincingly argue for any elaborate interpretation.

However, if one accepts that Vaughan Williams had no specific, blow-by-blow narrative

in mind for An Oxford Elegy, one may still ask whether or not other inspirations beside Holst lie

behind the work in a more general sense. I believe that the retrospective qualities of the text and

the music, even in the midst of much that is new, can give us clues to this end. The number of

retrospective works in the late period is conspicuously large, beginning with An Oxford Elegy, a

work that Ursula Vaughan Williams explicitly referred to as nostalgic. In other late works, the

loss of something precious in the present, and in some cases as pitted against a condition of the

distant past that is preferable, has received attention. In discussing the Oboe Concerto (1944),

Michael Kennedy wrote that “Very little of Vaughan Williams’s music is nostalgic, but here [the

central section of the finale] he seems to be yearning for some lost and precious thing.”309 In his

essay on The Pilgrim’s Progress, a work that more famously shares with An Oxford Elegy its

diverse mixture of previous styles, Nathaniel Lew concludes that for Vaughan Williams,

Bunyan’s allegory “became a means of revisiting his own personal past in a way that
309
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 347.

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overwhelmed his more contemporary creative impulses.”310 Finally, in his discussion of the

Eighth Symphony (1955), Eric Saylor suggests that Vaughan Williams “may well have been in a

valedictory frame of mind” while infusing the work with gestures and references from earlier

points in his career.311 It is not difficult to think in these terms when confronted in An Oxford

Elegy by lines such as “The bloom is gone and with the bloom go I!” in addition to the purely

musical retrospections in the work.

There are other late works that share with An Oxford Elegy a more explicit merging of

nostalgia and present loss with pastoral surroundings or metaphors. At least three treat themes of

juvenile innocence. Byron Adams writes briefly concerning the seventh movement of Hodie,

which features a text by Thomas Hardy. He links the lines treating Christ in the rustic Bethlehem

manger with a reflection of an adult beholder’s own loss of childlike faith:

Here, in the midst of the joyous celebration of Christmas, is

a cry for the innocent faith of childhood from a speaker
who has lost it, and experienced all the attendant pain and
uncertainty that comes in the wake of that loss. By
choosing this poem, Vaughan Williams clearly allies
himself with Hardy, whose lost childhood faith was not
replaced by adult belief.312

The Ten Blake Songs for tenor and oboe, originally written for the film The Vision of William

Blake (1958) and using texts mostly from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience,

show a similar predilection toward yearning for the peace and contentment of infancy. This is

evidenced by the very first number, “Infant Joy.” The third song, “The Piper,” is somewhat

Arcadian in nature, speaking as it does of childhood happiness and piping in a rural setting. But

interspersed are some songs of “experience,” where the harder and sadder matters of the adult

310
Nathaniel Lew, “The Pilgrim’s Progress and the pitfalls of nostalgia,” in Adams and Wells, eds., Vaughan
Williams Essays, p. 200.
311
Eric Saylor, “The Significance of Nation in the Music of Vaughan Williams,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Michigan, 2003), p. 189.
312
Adams, “Scripture, Church, and culture: biblical texts in the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams,” p. 116.

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world are the focus of the music. Of these, “Poison Tree,” where the text describes a murdered

adversary, is particularly grim. Lastly, one may consider the Ninth Symphony (1957). In his

extensive work with the manuscripts of the symphony, Alain Frogley revealed much about their

relationship to an unrealized dramatic work based on Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the

d’Urbervilles. He explains how the manuscript sources for the second movement make multiple

references to “Tess” and even mention “Stonehenge,” seemingly connecting musical ideas there

with the tragic concluding scene in Hardy’s novel in which Tess is finally arrested after seeking

refuge with her returned love interest, Angel Clare, for the night. She is then sentenced to hang

for the murder of the man who had earlier taken her youthful wholeness through sexual assault.

Vaughan Williams’s descriptors in the pages of this movement thus tempt us to connect the

menacing and tragic qualities we may hear in the music with the setting of rural Stonehenge, and

what transpires there.313 In these works, as in An Oxford Elegy, the pastoral mode acts as a

unifying bridge between a lost era of wholeness and a later time of crisis.314

Part of this trend may relate to the real-life situations of Vaughan Williams after the

Second World War. There are some strong indications in both the primary and secondary

literature that the onset of the new world war affected Vaughan Williams as deeply as the first

had, albeit in different ways. When Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939, Vaughan

Williams was approaching his sixty-seventh birthday and in a much different place in life than

the idealistic young man that he was around the turn of the century, or the combat-scarred

composer just reaching middle age in 1918, who, as it later transpired, had yet to write most of

313
For the full discussion, see Alain Frogley, Vaughan Williams’s Ninth Symphony (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), pp. 261-294.
314
There is a significant broader pattern of twentieth-century composers who in later stages of their careers
deliberately set out to depict innocent idyllism, often juxtaposed with menacing overtones. A short list includes
Gustav Mahler (several of the large scale works), Leoš Janáček (The Cunning Little Vixen, 1924), Carl Nielsen
(Symphony No. 6 – Sinfonia Semplice, 1925), and Dmitri Shostakovich (Symphony No. 15, 1971).

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his best-known works. There is much written about how World War II may be heard in the Sixth

Symphony and other works from the time. But when one examines Vaughan Williams’s own

thoughts in letters and essays, and the testimony of those closest to him, it is difficult to ignore

the mournful and reflective attitude with regard to what was going on around him. One discerns

the mourning of friends’ deaths, but also notices a renewed focus upon the fortunes of mankind.

The feeling of hope and excitement in human enterprise, and embraced by Vaughan Williams in

his early music, gave way in the late phase to more sober thoughts. Shortly after hostilities broke

out in September of 1939, Vaughan Williams involved himself in the war effort at home,

growing vegetables for those in need and aiding the domestic effort as a conductor and lecturer.

Michael Kennedy described him as being “in a strangely intense mood” at this time, and having

“his mind numbed by the possibilities of world catastrophe.”315 In a letter to Ursula Wood (later

Ursula Vaughan Williams), his resignation toward the war’s beginning is plain to see: “Is it

Herbert Fisher’s History of Europe you are reading – magnificent but depressing – all good

things men try to do perish…but nothing can destroy music – (platitude…)”316 The Second

World War would prove to be nearly as miserable for Vaughan Williams as was the First, if

considered in terms of lost lives around him. Another account given by Ursula shows the

recurring theme of loss during wartime as recalled from the Great War: “few weeks passed

without news of someone [Vaughan Williams and his wife Adeline] knew being killed or

wounded and they lamented again that other generation of musicians lost twenty-five years

before in the other war.”317 His reaction to the First World War appears similar to his feelings

upon the conclusion of the Second. Ursula relates this in her book. Note the natural references:

315
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 258.
316
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 230.
317
Ibid, p. 237.

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 On Sunday morning Ralph’s Thanksgiving for Victory was
broadcast; sunlight filled the garden: lilac tulips, and young
leaves were bright with dew. Adeline, Morris318, Ralph, and
I heard the broadcast together and we were all aware that it
was easier to mourn than to rejoice.319

In the years after the war, Vaughan Williams divulged in some of his letters certain

feelings he harboured toward the world’s political climate while reflecting upon the human

history through which he lived. One notices a recurring theme of regret, sometimes bordering on

a dystopian mindset, at what had come to pass since his youth. Some of his most revealing

thoughts appear in the course of a substantial correspondence with fellow English composer

Rutland Boughton. In these letters Vaughan Williams at times adopts the tone of an older man

reconsidering his youthful radicalism with a sobriety borne of experience, and almost with regret

that some of the promising ideas from around the turn of the century turned out to be untenable

or poorly realized upon (mis)application. One excerpt in particular suggests his dismay and anger

over failed social experiments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, recalling his

feelings related to the inadequate planning of the Scott expedition. The context of the following

statement involves his refusal to sign a 1949 petition for peace between Britain and Russia, a

consequent written reproof on the part of Boughton, and a remark made by the latter that

implicates Vaughan Williams in drawing too much on what he considered to be a dead theology

in The Pilgrim’s Progress:

318
This refers to R.O. Morris, who was a composer and teacher of composition and counterpoint at the Royal
College of Music, and for a time at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Morris was married to Vaughan Williams’s
first wife Adeline Fisher’s sister Emmeline, and thus became Vaughan Williams’s brother-in-law. He and Emmeline
lived with Vaughan Williams and Adeline during most of the war at “The White Gates,” the Vaughan Williams’s
home in Dorking. Morris had a great reputation as a teacher and taught many pupils who would go on to be
eminent composers.
319
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 263. The Thanksgiving for Victory, renamed A Song of Thanksgiving in
1952, is a modest work for soprano, speaker, chorus and orchestra lasting about 15 minutes in performance and
using texts from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Rudyard Kipling. It was commissioned by the BBC in 1944 to be played
upon an Allied Victory, which by that point was expected soon.

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 As regards my Opera, might I ask you, at all events to read
the libretto before your criticise me for writing it, and as to
what you accuse me of – i.e. ‘redressing an old theology’, it
seems to me that some of your ideas are a good deal more
moribund than Bunyan’s theology:- the old fashioned
republicism [sic] and Marxism which led direct to the
appalling dictatorships of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, or
your Rationalism, which dates from about 1880 and has
entirely failed to solve any problems of the Universe.320

A later response to a letter containing Boughton’s disavowal of communism as an ideology sees

Vaughan Williams making the distinction between the attractive idea of socialism and its abuse

by certain practitioners:

All right-minded people are in theory communists insofar

as they believe that everything ought to be done for the
common good, but when Socialism in practice means the
unholy mess which the late government made of things and
when Communism in practice means tyranny, double
dealing and insincerity by Russia, one cannot join with its
present manifestation.321

Another letter in this correspondence finds Vaughan Williams painting a picture of himself as a

political contrarian. But one also detects something of a contrast between his youthful embrace

of the socialist ideal and his later distaste for its subsequent manifestations.

My fault is probably that I have been always too much in

opposition. When I was a boy at school I and another boy
stood out as Radicals (as we were called then) against all
the other boys. When I got to Cambridge in ’93 I and a few
friends read the Fabian tracts, and in opposition to the
majority of undergraduates, became socialists…The truth
is, I think, that when I am with the Conservatives I become
socialistic and when I am with Socialists I become a true
blue Tory. Now the pendulum has swung right around and
it is fashionable to be a Socialist or ‘Kremlinist’ – (I will
not defile what ought to be a fine name ‘Communist’ by

320
Vaughan Williams, personal letter to Rutland Boughton, 20 December 1950. Quoted in Cobbe, ed., Letters of
Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, p. 471. (The “sic” is Cobbe’s.)
321
Vaughan Williams, personal letter to Rutland Boughton, 25 June 1952. Quoted in Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph
Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, p. 501.

176
 calling the present creed by that name), I have the courage
to criticise and dissociate myself with the present
manifestations of what used to be a fine creed, and I am not
afraid to have the finger of scorn pointed at me because I
refuse to be taken in by all these bogus ‘peace’ moves,
which I think have duped even you…I believe in freedom
and that is why I will not be bullied by Nazis, Fascists, and
Russians.322

In one final letter pertaining to this pattern, there surfaces more evidence of Vaughan Williams

recalling youthful attitudes that are at some odds with subsequent experience. In this instance the

statements appear in a letter to fellow English composer and conductor Fritz Hart.

I wonder if things are mentally so very different now to

what they were when we were young. I believe the things
we talked about at Wilkins were much the same as what
our followers at the modern equivalent of Wilkins say now
& that the clever young men who write in modern journals
are saying exactly the same clever foolish things that young
men said in 1896 and old B. Shaw says exactly what he
said in the ‘Saturday Review’ in the 90’s.323

At the same time, to paint a picture of a composer utterly consumed with bitterness

resulting from the post-World War II world would not be accurate. One will be disappointed in

seeking hard evidence that could cast Vaughan Williams as an equivalent of Beethoven, who

furiously scratched out a dedication to Napoleon when he doubted that the French leader could

usher in a new Enlightenment Utopia. It happens, rather, that the ambivalence in Vaughan

Williams’s late music finds something of a parallel in his political views. Despite the sadness and

regret in these written accounts, Vaughan Williams, in ways that perhaps recall the speaker’s

final words in An Oxford Elegy, continued to hope that lasting peace and freedom could be

322
Vaughan Williams, personal letter to Rutland Boughton, 9 July 1952. Quoted in Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph
Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, pp. 502-503.
323
Vaughan Williams, personal letter to Fritz Hart, 24 August ?1946. Quoted in Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph
Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, p. 403. The words Italics appear as such in Cobbe’s volume and presumably
represent Vaughan Williams’s own emphases. As Cobbe explains in a footnote to this letter, “Wilkins” refers to a
café in London where Vaughan Williams and other young students, including Holst and Ireland, would discuss a
wide range of topics at length.

177
realized in post-war Europe. In particular, the composer openly espoused the idea of a European

Federal Union in belief that a politically unified Europe could prevent another catastrophic war

from occurring. He summarized this position in a letter to Iris Lemare during the early stages of

the war:

I hope for a United States of Europe to which all nations

(including Germans) who do not believe in force will
belong. Not a league of sovereign nations – but a Union to
which all nations will give up a part of their sovereignty –
preserving their individuality and nationality for their own
affairs.324

Here, after reading Vaughan Williams’s attitudes toward the political and social past

through which he lived, is perhaps the best place to return to the issue of the text and music in An

Oxford Elegy. While merely reading these sentiments gives us no certain way to interpret the

work, they demonstrate how Vaughan Williams’s concerns and worldview stood distinct and in a

different time from those of Matthew Arnold. It may be true that both shared a melancholic

attitude toward their respective times, but their circumstances differed greatly. Arnold had a

unique relationship with the encroaching modernism of the late nineteenth century. His anxiety

stemmed from his belief that traditional religion and moral certainty were no longer possible in a

modern world. He placed his faith in high art and culture, and resolved to hope that these could

provide a suitable moral paradigm for the masses if properly controlled and administered by a

group of elite intellectuals. Vaughan Williams, on the other hand, composed An Oxford Elegy on

the other side of the cultural changes that were just beginning in Arnold’s lifetime. His

ambivalence toward a collective leadership intended to work in the best interest of the people is

plain to see, as is his lack of trust in pure reason as any sort of guiding light. Roger Savage asks

324
Vaughan Williams, personal letter to Iris Lemare, 4 October 1940. Quoted in Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph
Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, p. 307.

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whether Vaughan Williams omitted so many lines that deal specifically with “modern malaise”

in his adaptation because he already felt that he had addressed these matters in the Sixth

Symphony. But perhaps in relating to Arnold’s nostalgia in A Scholar Gypsy and Thyrsis,

Vaughan Williams was mourning something apart, if he was really mourning something at all,

from the loss of a religious faith he never had, or from a moral certitude that, as shown in his

actions and writings on music, he retained, and which utterly contrasts with Arnold’s somber

wavering. Vaughan Williams would likely have experienced a different modern malaise than the

most topically-specific lines in Arnold’s poem could properly address, but experienced related

feelings nonetheless.

Ultimately, however, this is all peripheral to the larger issue. Whether or to what degree

Vaughan Williams’s specific political preoccupations in old age inform An Oxford Elegy or any

other composition from his last years, there are discernable patterns that distinguish the elegiac

pastoral music in the 1920s from that of the last phase, in spite of much that they may share. The

kind of elegiac texts and music presented in An Oxford Elegy and other late pastoral works I

have discussed exude an autumnal retrospection and nostalgia for the earlier times in a person’s

life. They mourn not only the loss of one’s youth, but also loss in the form of hopes and ideas

ultimately unfulfilled. The pastoral music dating from the years immediately following the Great

War, rather than being particularly retrospective, emphasizes a fresh aesthetic in the wake of a

military conflict in which Vaughan Williams directly participated. Very little of it can be called

nostalgic in the sense that music of the composer’s much earlier periods and styles works in the

same retrospective vein that they do during the final phase. In his later years, Vaughan Williams

often employs the pastoral mode in ways that align with the “tragic but resilient humanism,” that

informs the Scott music. In An Oxford Elegy this manifests itself in a musical setting of a text

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where a concluding refusal to despair in the face of present anxiety operates alongside hope that

the wholeness of former times might once again be realized. In other works I examined, one may

discern the theme of youthful innocence in rural settings juxtaposed with the tragic realities of

adult experience, also in rural settings. Part of the Scott aesthetic is a refusal to yield to despair,

even when present negative or catastrophic outcomes seem certain and an ideal past

unrecoverable. This implies something to live for or, put another way, something with which to

confront death. Vaughan Williams may have personally admired the courage and resolution of

Scott and his men when they faced certain death, but his anger at the underlying needlessness of

it all prevented any sense of final satisfaction, despite occasional references to optimism in his

late works. What were lacking, despite a clear admiration for Scott’s bravery, were any positive

values beyond admiring a hero’s demeanor during his demise. It turns out that one need not look

far to find a major composition completed in the last years that offers such further affirmation. In

the next chapter I will examine this work – the morality The Pilgrim’s Progress – where the

pastoral mode once more plays a pivotal and unique role.

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 Chapter 6
Vaughan Williams and the Pastoral Allegory: The Pilgrim’s Progress

Epigraph: “We all miss him sadly – above all, his wonderful, uncompromising courage in
fighting for all those things he believed in – things which I personally believe to
be some of the most important things in life.” – Benjamin Britten, letter to the newly
widowed Ursula Vaughan Williams, dated 28 August 1958

The final phase in Vaughan Williams’s career saw not only the fulfillment of his long

interest in the poetry of Matthew Arnold and his desire to create a substantial composition based

upon it, but also the fruition of a longer and more pervasive preoccupation: John Bunyan’s 17th

century allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress. The final product, a four-act operatic composition of

the same name, was completed in 1949 and revised in the following years. The music went

through various stages of conception and composition dating back over four decades. A good

portion originated or appeared in other compositions along the way.325 Several statements in the

secondary literature affirm the deep-seated presence that Bunyan’s allegory had throughout the

composer’s works and artistic consciousness. For example, Nathaniel Lew writes: “Vaughan

Williams’s periodic returns to this subject demonstrate both its importance to him and its

congruity with certain of his musical aims: he retained certain elements from work to work

despite changing times and performance opportunities and even as his own musical and aesthetic

ideals varied.”326

325
A short list includes: the original incidental music for the Reigate production of a play based upon Bunyan’s The
Pilgrim’s Progress in 1906 (a first published edition of this music is now being prepared by Nathaniel Lew), The
Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains (completed 1922, and of which all but the final section was transplanted to
the opera under discussion), the Fifth Symphony (completed 1943), and the incidental music for the BBC Radio
version of The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1943.
326
Lew, “The Pilgrim’s Progress and the pitfalls of nostalgia,” p. 176. For a sampling of other statements, see also
Day, Vaughan Williams, pp. 169-173; Frank Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pp. 360-361; and Roy
Douglas, Working with R.V.W., p. 20.

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 When The Pilgrim’s Progress premiered in April of 1951, it suffered from a faulty

production and puzzled many in its first audience.327 Perhaps sensing that the work did not (and

would not in the future) make a wholly satisfying impression, Vaughan Williams made a defiant

remark immediately after the premiere. The statement speaks to his special, personal fondness

for both the libretto and the music he spent so long creating: “They won’t like it, they don’t want

an opera with no heroine and no love duets – and I don’t care, it’s what I meant, and there it

is.”328 His premonition proved somewhat well-founded. Critical reaction during the early life of

The Pilgrim’s Progress was decidedly cool, with some feeling that the work was unfit for the

stage and better suited to a venue befitting an oratorio or a comparable genre.329 Performances of

the work ever since have been relatively rare despite its having retained devoted admirers in

recent times.

Nathaniel Lew’s already-cited recent chapter, “The Pilgrim’s Progress and the pitfalls of

nostalgia,” addresses Vaughan Williams’s seemingly inexplicable urge to invest so much energy

and to risk his reputation upon this particular work and libretto. He describes how the

“nationalist and pastoralist” elements of The Pilgrim’s Progress form part of a cultural heritage

belonging to a former age. Lew suggests that Vaughan Williams was too close to Bunyan’s work

and allowed it to overwhelm “his more contemporary creative impulses” later on.330 I have

already shown how in the composer’s correspondence with Rutland Boughton, the latter accused

Vaughan Williams of “redressing an old theology” in the libretto of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The

response Boughton received resounds with trenchant loyalty to Bunyan’s allegory and an

327
For an account of the first production’s flaws and reception, see Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan
Williams, pp. 309-315. The Pilgrim’s Progress was premiered at London’s Covent Garden, with Leonard Hancock
leading the Covent Garden Orchestra and Chorus. Arnold Matters sang the role of the Pilgrim.
328
Quoted in Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., p. 308.
329
For more information on and samples of these reactions see Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams,
pp. 309-315.
330
Lew, “The Pilgrim’s Progress and the pitfalls of nostalgia,” p. 200.

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accompanying reproof of the more “modern ideology” of communism to which Boughton

subscribed in all but his last years.

In gauging both Vaughan Williams’s resolute determination to find contemporary

relevance in Bunyan’s work, and the reactions discussed elsewhere in recent print sources, the

question of “why” merits discussion. Why did he risk so much and spend so many years on the

allegory that became the basis for his final completed opera? The answers I will offer in this

chapter closely concern his life experiences and accrued convictions about the musical world in

which he lived. I will explore how the ethos of Bunyan’s allegory deeply informed Vaughan

Williams’s musical attitudes and appeared on multiple occasions in his lectures and published

writings. In light of both these and his repeated returns to Bunyan-related musical projects,

Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was more than a valedictory statement. The final

opera became, in a very real sense, his allegory. Given the great extent to which The Pilgrim’s

Progress as a whole draws on pastoral imagery and symbolism, I point to close similarities

between the medieval and Renaissance traditions of pastoral allegories as social and political

commentaries, and the unique place that Vaughan Williams gave Bunyan’s allegory in his

writings and music.

In order to best discern the parallels between Vaughan Williams’s relationship to

Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and the literary tradition of allegory, it is first necessary to

examine this tradition and how it relates to Bunyan’s work. As with “elegy” and “pastoral,”

delineating precise parameters for “allegory” poses a formidable task. Allegory as a literary

phenomenon has persisted in widely contrasting works from ancient times through the twenty-

first century. In his classic commentary on allegorical love in medieval and Renaissance

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literature, C.S. Lewis (whose own fictional series, The Chronicles of Narnia, heavily borrows

from Christian allegory) writes: “Allegory, in some sense, belongs not to medieval man, but to

man, or even mind, in general. It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what

is immaterial in picturable terms.”331 In narrowing focus upon a specifically English body of

allegorical literature that coincides with pastoral tradition, some important works from the late

medieval and Renaissance periods loom large – William Langland’s Piers Plowman (late 14th

century), Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s

Progress (1678). In each of these writings the theme of the epic quest features centrally, with the

protagonists encountering fantastical beings, settings, and scenarios along the way. These

characteristics stretch across differing traditions between medieval and Renaissance allegorical

literature, and across poetic and prose formats. They function as critical commentary on real-life

ecclesiastical, political, or cultural happenings.332 As one article in an encyclopedia devoted to

allegory puts it: "To the extent that epics are quest narratives they are allegorical...The hero's

journey is an extended metaphor for life's journey. In another sense, too, epics are allegorical.

Epics reflect the values and aspirations of particular cultures."333

331
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 44.
332
It is these aspects of allegorical pastoral literature that form the basis for Renato Poggioli’s critique of the
tradition. He provides a summary statement of his criticism in his landmark book on pastoral literature. Here are
some representative lines: “The allegorical pastoral is a serious travesty, rather than a burlesque. Its inspiration is
at best that of a satire; at worst that of an invective…For this special and minor genre the pastoral is but machinery
or at its simplest, a device, based on no other motivation that the verbal identity, or metaphorical parallelism,
between shepherds of sheep and shepherds of souls…In brief, the allegorical pastoral turns the praise of pastoral
life into an indictment of the bad shepherds of the Church; and if it evokes an ideal of bucolic purity and idyllic
innocence, it is only to make more severe its condemnation of the pastors who betray it.” See Poggioli, The Oaten
Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal, p. 94. Whatever the merits of Poggioli’s views on pastoral
allegory, his dubbing of the genre as “minor” seems to be inconsistent with the amount of pastoral allegorical
literature, both within and outside the Christian tradition, as well as the amount of secondary literature addressing
the subject and quoted throughout this chapter.
333
David Adams Leeming and Kathleen Morgan Drowne, The Encyclopedia of Allegorical Literature (Santa Barbara:
ABC-CLIO, 1996), pp. 87-88.

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 The moral dimension of allegory is unique as it pertains to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s

Progress. Although most allegories contain a vital moral element by definition, Bunyan’s work

diverges from the sixteenth-century political allegories by Spenser and others in its focus upon

the common man. It is primarily concerned not with extolling monarch-backed institutions and

ideas at the expense of opposing ones, but with an average person’s quest for salvation using the

Bible as his sole final authority. In this respect Bunyan seems to rely less on humanistic

principles and more on spiritual truths as taught by Scripture. In the words of Maureen Quilligan:

The privileged authority of the pretext within the text

makes Bunyan’s allegory essentially different from
Spenser’s or (Langland’s); both the earlier allegorists posit
a trust in man’s language which Bunyan seems to lack. For
Spenser and Langland, man’s language exists in continuum
with the truthful language of Scripture; for Bunyan, man’s
language is less potent as well as able to cause much harm,
and the only truly trustworthy words are between the
covers of Christian’s book.334

In The Pilgrim’s Progress, the emphasis is squarely upon the individual protagonist “Christian,”

his journey to “The Celestial City” (that is, the life of faith culminating in the promise of

salvation as taught by Scripture), and his personal struggles with hardship and temptation along

the way. As Richard Greaves puts it, “The Pilgrim’s Progress is Bunyan’s resounding testament

that through faith he would triumph over persecution, doubt, and despair, progressing from the

City of Destruction to the Celestial City.”335

What remains is to identify the particularly pastoral elements within The Pilgrim’s

Progress as a moral allegory, both those long associated with the literary tradition and those

more particular to Bunyan’s writing. Allegory’s partnership with the pastoral mode in a broader

334
Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p.
123.
335
Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002), p. 265.

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sense has been widely acknowledged. Somewhat simplistically, William Empson essentially

defined pastoral in terms similar to those of allegory when he referred to it as “putting the

complex into the simple.”336 Yet even given much broader definitions, pastoral’s partnership

with allegory by the time of Bunyan was widespread. David Daiches, in a written history of

English literature, states: “Not only was the pastoral well established in Renaissance poetry by

Spenser’s time; it had also been frequently used in an allegorical manner for moral and satirical

purposes. Pastoral allegory was thus an established note.”337 Likewise, there are several tropes

and themes that figured in pastoral allegories throughout the medieval and the Renaissance

periods. Most go beyond allegory and figure prominently in pastoral literature at large. Kenneth

Borris provides a relevant summary statement:

In pastoral, for example, shepherds commonly had

ecclesiastical, political, literary, or personal applications in
figurative contexts, while tending or abusing sheep
expressed a corresponding stance toward the relevant
responsibilities. The topos of the golden age, the myth of
Eden [sic], and the parable of the good shepherd were
fundamental imagistic and conceptual resources for
pastoral allegory, and this brief inventory could be much
expanded.338

Anyone who has read The Pilgrim’s Progress will recognize in it some points of

similarity with what Borris offers in his inventory. He invites us to expand upon these, and one

of the first crucial elements to add is that of the role played by local landscape in shaping the

backdrop, and lending to the ethos, of the allegorical quest. As early as Virgil’s writings, a reader

can recognize the countryside around Rome as it shaped, for example, the setting of the

336
William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral, p. 23. (Cited at the beginning of chapter 1.) See also Gifford,
Pastoral, pp. 9, 22-23; and Roni Natov, The Poetics of Childhood (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 92.
337
David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature Volume I, Revised Edition (Allied Publishers Private
Limited, 1960, 1979, 2005), pp. 166-167.
338
Kenneth Borris, Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton
(Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 66-67. Borris cites Helen Cooper’s Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance as
a good source for further information on the repertoire of pastoral allegory. I second his recommendation.

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Eclogues. Piers Plowman opens within, and otherwise draws heavily from, the landscape of the

Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. Spenser used the various settings of “faerie land” in The Faerie

Queene as a euphemism for England and the topics with which he equates it. So too does Bunyan

draw from a local landscape around Bedford and southeastern England to couch the pastoral

scenery that laces his own allegory.339

One other aspect of The Pilgrim’s Progress deserves consideration in terms of its

character – its heavy autobiographical focus. The emphasis of Bunyan’s allegory is very much

upon the individual’s quest for personal salvation. This takes on deeper overtones when

considering how many elements of the story parallel Bunyan’s own life circumstances. I will not

dwell here upon an extensive list, but one well-known parallel in particular deserves special

mention. This concerns the episode in Part I where Christian is imprisoned for his faith after a

visit to the sinful town Vanity Fair, and after witnessing the martyrdom of his companion

Faithful. Bunyan himself was imprisoned multiple times in his life, primarily for preaching in

violation of the Anglican Church regulations of his time and place. Most scholars agree that it

was during a 1675 stint in prison that he completed the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress.340

This specific instance of allegory paralleling real life is significant as a fundamental theme

339
A qualification must be made here. In pointing out the prominent role that local landscape plays in The Pilgrim’s
Progress we must not suppose that it plays the only or even the dominant role at all times. I already quoted Roger
Sharrock in Chapter 4, where he points out that Bunyan’s scenery in The Delectable Mountains and other places
was inspired by descriptions of pastoral landscapes found in the Biblical books of Psalms and Song of Solomon. For
a discussion of Bunyan’s dream setting of The Pilgrim’s Progress and the various (and sometimes opposite)
elements it employs, see Henri A. Talon, “Space and the Hero in The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Study of the Meaning of
the Allegorical Universe,” in Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Casebook (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1976),
edited by Roger Sharrock, pp. 158-167. The first page of this article affirms the localized setting to be found in The
Pilgrim’s Progress before discussing other elements. Perhaps the most comprehensive source laying out the
various places in Bedfordshire that are identifiable with scenes from The Pilgrim’s Progress is Vera Brittain’s In the
Steps of John Bunyan: An Excursion Into Puritan England 2nd Edition (London: Rich and Cowan, 1950).
340
See David Hawkes, "Bunyan, John," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (Oxford University Press,
2005), edited by David Scott Kastan. The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature: (e-reference edition). Oxford
University Press. Access at the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign. 28 August 2010 http://www.oxford-
britishliterature.com/entry?entry=t198.e0068.

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throughout Bunyan’s story: the willingness of the protagonist not only to endure acute

persecution, hardship, and loss in the interest of a strongly held set of principles and beliefs, but

to be convinced that such faith will bring ultimate rewards at the end of all.

Both local setting and autobiography in The Pilgrim’s Progress heighten the personal

flavor of Bunyan’s allegory. While it is abundantly true that he borrows from the Bible and other

outside sources, he never relays any portion of the story but that with which he is somehow

acquainted personally. Henri Talon summarizes:

The direct source of The Pilgrim’s Progress is Bunyan’s

own experience. The spiritual development which is found
in the autobiography, Grace Abounding, appears again in
the allegory: but the growth of a conscience has become a
Pilgrimage, the inward action has taken a concrete form,
and the invisible ways of the understanding have built a
road and paths like those of seventeenth century England.
So the incidents in Christian’s tale are symbols of his
inward life.341

In spite of this basic characteristic, or perhaps in part because of it, Bunyan’s allegory has

achieved a kind of widespread attention that has eluded Langland’s and arguably even Spenser’s

texts. David Hawkes’s article on John Bunyan for the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature

begins by stating that, after the Bible, The Pilgrim’s Progress was the most widely read book in

the English-speaking world for two hundred years after it appeared.342 As Paul Fussell has

shown, its popularity persisted in England into the twentieth century, particularly with the

generation who fought in the Great War. In Chapter 4 I cited Fussell’s description of how

soldiers saw their service in terms of the Pilgrim and the symbols in his story, making Bunyan’s

allegory coincide with their own experiences. Such appropriation of The Pilgrim’s Progress has

not been limited to this example. Given that the allegory is fundamentally Christian in outlook, it

341
Talon, “Space and the Hero in The Pilgrim’s Progress,” p. 158.
342
David Hawkes, "Bunyan, John," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature.

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is remarkable how people and groups of different times and ideological leanings have continued

to relate to it. A major reason for this is that Bunyan’s work transcends mere religious teaching

and speaks to real life circumstances that human beings of all creeds and intellectual levels

encounter. Roger Sharrock put it well in his introduction to the Penguin edition of The Pilgrim’s

Progress: “The strength of the work and the sense of reality it communicates to readers of widely

differing varieties of belief depend on this combination of religious vision with loving, exact

observation of human character.”343 Thus, many of the virtues Bunyan associates with the

Christian journey are applicable in other contexts as well; the universality inherent within The

Pilgrim’s Progress is that of common human experience. To quote F.R. Leavis, The Pilgrim’s

Progress “has the vitality and significance of major art” and presents “a vitalizing reminder of

human nature, human potentiality, and human need, and remaining that for us even though we

may find wholly unprofitable the theology with which Bunyan accompanies it.”344

One need look no further for a substantive example of Bunyan’s allegory being taken in

such a way than Vaughan Williams’s own involvement with it. First, Vaughan Williams retained

a lifelong love for this book despite holding first an atheistic and then an agnostic worldview

during the course of his life. Second, there is direct evidence that he regarded The Pilgrim’s

Progress as being open to multiple interpretations. His explanation to Rutland Boughton as to

why he changed the protagonist’s name from “Christian” to “Pilgrim” in his completed opera is

proof that he himself saw the allegory along the lines just discussed: “I on purpose did not call

the Pilgrim ‘Christian’ because I want the idea to be universal and apply to anybody who aims at

the spiritual life whether he is Xtian, Jew, Buddhist, Shintoist, or 5th Day Adventist.”345

However, if Vaughan Williams believed that The Pilgrim’s Progress could accommodate a wide

343
Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, edited by Sharrock, p. xiv.
344
F.R. Lewis, “Bunyan’s Resoluteness,” in Sharrock, ed., Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Casebook, pp. 204, 218.
345
See Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pp. 313.

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range of perspectives, there is also evidence that it nonetheless held specific meanings for him. In

deliberately dubbing the opera “a morality,” he raises what I see as two primary questions. First,

what did he find particularly “moral” about Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress? Second, in what

ways did his musical treatment of The Pilgrim’s Progress bring out the moral element of

allegory? In addressing these questions, I will now turn to Vaughan Williams’s writings and then

examine certain decisions he made as the composer of the “morality” The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Throughout his large body of published articles and essays, Vaughan Williams makes

frequent use of outside maxims and allusions to illustrate his points. Often one will find

references to Bible verses, which demonstrate how profoundly this text influenced the composer

culturally and intellectually.346 There are also multiple instances in which he draws upon imagery

and symbolism from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, often in ways that reveal his specific

views on topics of great importance to him. Below is a table listing occasions where Vaughan

Williams refers to Pilgrim’s Progress tropes in the course of his writings.

Table 6.1

Written Statements by Vaughan Sources in which the Statements

Williams pertaining to Bunyan Appear
and/or The Pilgrim’s Progress
“Does anyone dare to sneer at our “A Sermon to Vocalists,” in The
one hope in the slough of despond – Vocalist Vol. 1, No. 2 (1902), p. 38.
the one fact to which we can point (Quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan
and say, ‘We are not an unmusical Williams on Music, p. 29.)
nation’?” (Referring to national
tunes)

346
Probably the best example of this may be found in the eighth section (“Some Conclusions”) of Vaughan
Williams’s book National Music. Here Vaughan Williams uses several well known biblical verses to help him
illustrate separate points he makes. He refers in print to each as a separate “sermon.” See National Music and
Other Essays, pp. 62-73.

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Table 6.1 (cont.)

“It is as if a crowd of malignant, “Ein Heldenleben,” in The Vocalist

poisonous flies were upon us all of a Vol. 1, No. 10 (1903), pp. 295-296.
sudden; the flutes, clarinets, and (Quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan
oboes spit and snarl, while two Williams on Music, p. 160.)
tubas reiterate their monotonous
three notes like Pope in Pilgrim’s
Progress…”
“The art of the folk-singer, like all “Sailor Shanties,” in Musical News
true art, is essentially un- and Herald Vol. 61, No. 1553
selfconscious – the artistic result is (1921): pp. 683-684. (Quoted in
not openly sought, but comes, as it Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on
were, by accident. Thus Bunyan, in Music, p. 215.)
trying to preach a sermon, produced
a masterpiece of literature…”
“As a composer his love and “Sir Donald Tovey,” in William
knowledge of the classics has led Rothenstein, Contemporaries:
him along the great lines of musical Portrait Drawings by Sir William
thought by the narrow way right up Rothenstein, with Appreciations by
the hill and not along the way of Various Hands (London: Faber,
destruction, to stumble, fall and rise 1937), pp. 102-104. (Quoted in
no more.” Manning, Vaughan Williams on
Music, p. 71.)

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Table 6.1 (cont.)

“In the history of our art there has “Ivor Gurney (1890-1937),” in
always been the good way, ‘the Vaughan Williams, National Music
King’s highway, cast up by and Other Essays, pp. 256-257.
Patriarchs or prophets, as straight as (This tribute to Gurney bears the
a rule can make it, the way we must postdate 1938.)
go’. Those who tread this way are
not merely blind followers of the
blind – not slaves but free; each one
makes his own footsteps on that
road and leaves his own impress.
Here lies the true originality, the
originality of inevitableness. There
are others, it is true, who say ‘we
will not walk therein’, but they
seldom find that rest to their souls,
that simplicity and serenity which is
surely the final aim of all art. Too
often they merely avoid Hill
Difficulty and wander into a “wide
field full of dark mountains where
they stumble and fall to rise no
more’. Ivor Gurney is a Pilgrim on
the straight and narrow road…”

“One more thing. This Musical Introduction to News Chronicle

Competition Festival is for Musical Competition Festival for
members of HM Forces. I HM Forces in Association with
understand that some military National Service Entertainments
authorities consider that music is Board (London: News Chronicle,
‘softening’ for the soldier. I would 1942). (Quoted in Manning, ed.,
remind them that Socrates held that Vaughan Williams on Music, p. 88.)
certain kinds of music put courage
in the heart of the soldier, that
David was an expert harpist but
managed to slay Goliath, that Mr.
Valiant-for-Truth carried his marks
and scars with him across the river
and that when he passed over all the
trumpets sounded for him on the
other side. Who shall dare say that
music is not an essential part of the
soldier’s equipment?”

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Table 6.1 (cont.)

“So my choral friend who thought “Choral Singing,” in Concert

he was playing in a game was really programme for performance of
practising a great art. This is how Vaughan Williams’s A Sea
we do things in this country. Like Symphony and Walton’s
Mr. By-Ends’ father, we look one Belshazzar’s Feast. Huddersfield
way and row the other. Bunyan Choral Society, Royal Choral
himself wrote his great epic under Society and London Symphony
the impression that he was saving Orchestra, conducted by Sir
men’s souls. Reynolds practiced his Malcolm Sargent. Royal Albert
wonderful art for material reward. Hall, 9 June 1951. (Quoted in
Shelley thought his poems were Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on
important only insofar as they Music, p. 94.)
promoted social reform. So we
choralists think we play a game and
lo! We have achieved a great art.”
“Martin Shaw has devoted himself “Martin Shaw,” in The Diocesan
to the cause of church music from Magazine Vol. 42, No. 6 (1955), pp.
the time he met Percy Dearmer, and 85-87. (Quoted in Manning, ed.,
they worked together to rescue our Vaughan Williams on Music, p.
church music from the slough of 276.)
despond into which the Victorian
fondness for sacharine [sic]
insincerity had led it.”
“Sibelius has gone straight up the “Sibelius (1865-1957) (A tribute
Hill Difficulty and has left it to written on the occasion of his
others to wander to destruction in ninetieth birthday),” in Vaughan
Bypath Meadow; he will be the first Williams, National Music and
to arrive at the Celestial City, even Other Essays, pp. 261-264.
if the others arrive at all and are not
refused admittance because they
have no certificate. So up the hill
the Pilgrim goes, along the well
trodden path, and there he can still
find priceless jewels which perhaps
only he can see and know how to
use.”

Much in these statements relates directly to the present discussion of Bunyan’s allegory,

and they help illustrate some overriding principles that Vaughan Williams adopted as part of an

artistic creed. In the cases of his tributes to Ivor Gurney and Jean Sibelius, for example, he extols

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what he sees as the artistic virtues carried out by both composers in casting each as a Pilgrim

walking a kind of ‘straight and narrow path.’ In the excerpt on Gurney one may see how he

equates this path (“cast up by Patriarchs and Prophets” – exact wording from Bunyan) with what

he calls “the originality of inevitableness,” or the only true originality. He expounds upon this by

describing how Gurney worked within the traditions handed down to him by his teacher

Stanford, and more indirectly by a group of nineteenth-century German masters. In the excerpt

on Sibelius, Vaughan Williams lauds how the Finnish composer generally aligns himself with

the harmonic tradition of Beethoven and Schubert and does not ask his performers to do unusual

things with their instruments as would befit a more avant-garde approach. He then equates this

manner of composing with the “well trodden path” that yields riches and eventually ends with

the Celestial City. In so doing, he writes, Sibelius has avoided Bypath Meadow (“where others

wander to destruction”) by going “straight up Hill Difficulty.” In both examples, Vaughan

Williams clearly uses tropes from The Pilgrim’s Progress to express one of his own primary

artistic positions: successful composers draw upon their own traditions and diligent training

within these traditions as a means to develop an original voice, rather than forsaking their

heritage entirely and seeking what are ultimately dead-end novelties.

As one can see in Table 6.1, another Pilgrim’s Progress trope that Vaughan Williams

referred to more than once in his writings is that of the “Slough of Despond.” In Bunyan’s

allegory, this takes the form of a deep bog that Christian encounters early in his journey to the

Celestial City. Bunyan describes it as a place where Pilgrims may feel the weight of their guilt

over sin, and anxiety over the prospects of embarking upon a long Christian journey. A glance at

the instances where Vaughan Williams employs this reference shows that he positions it very

similarly. As the above table indicates, his first use of the term occurs in a very early writing

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entitled “A Sermon to Vocalists,” where toward the conclusion he briefly discusses English

songs. He explicitly equates “the slough of despond” with feelings of inferiority resulting when

British people think of their own folk songs as ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘countrified.’347 Instead, he

argues, the British may take heart even amidst these feelings and point to such songs as proof

that England is not an “unmusical” land. The other context where he invokes “the slough of

despond” occurs in a tribute to the composer Martin Shaw that was penned more than four

decades later.348 The term appears within a brief reference to church music, where he uses it to

refer to the undesirable state of affairs wherein Victorian church music relied too much on “a

fondness for sacharine [sic] insincerity.” His work on editing The English Hymnal, including his

written introduction to the volume, involved making difficult decisions on which hymns to

include as well as considerable effort on his part to exclude those selections he felt constituted a

lesser quality. The use of the name “slough of despond” to refer to a specific kind of these

“substandard” hymns reinforces our understanding of his convictions on the matter through the

use of another Bunyan trope.349

I leave it to the reader to refer to Table 6.1 for the remaining instances of Vaughan

Williams using Bunyan’s allegorical imagery to illustrate his convictions. In these examples, it

cannot be clearer that he saw artistic choices as moral choices that could sometimes be illustrated

using figures of speech from his favorite allegory. Indeed, in the course of an article praising

Hubert Parry, he implied that his teacher’s attitude of equating artistic problems with moral

347
Vaughan Williams’s use of the term “countrified” only reinforces the notion, discussed in Chapter 2, that he
associated such a concept with folksong generally.
348
Martin Shaw (1875-1958) was an English composer and writer known for his sacred and stage works. He
collaborated with Vaughan Williams on two collected volumes – The Oxford Book of Carols (1928) and Songs of
Praise (Oxford, 1931).
349
Vaughan Williams does not incorporate a Slough of Despond scene into his opera The Pilgrim’s Progress.

195
problems was justified.350 Perhaps nowhere is there clearer evidence that Vaughan Williams

himself took this to heart than in his specially named “morality” The Pilgrim’s Progress. I will

now turn to this work and more closely examine how Vaughan Williams’s choices present

further support for the notion that The Pilgrim’s Progress can be seen as his adopted pastoral

allegory.

The separate scenes in Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress have already

received some discussion in the existing secondary literature, and there is no need to survey them

here.351 Herbert Murrill’s contemporaneous written comment that The Pilgrim’s Progress is “a

work summarizing in three hours virtually the whole creative output of a great composer” is as

concise a description as any.352 But another comment made by Murrill in the same paragraph is

of equal interest: “For the lessons he has to teach – of humility, of integrity, of directness, of

devotion to our art – cannot be too often repeated.”353 This is striking, particularly when viewed

in light of later criticisms that Vaughan Williams’s morality fails to match the interest or worth

of his other compositions from around the same time. In The Pilgrim’s Progress references to

hymns and other simpler mediums serve, often in partnership with pastoral themes, to underline

and in some ways even embody the moral messages presented in multiple scenes.

The opera opens with a “prologue” wherein the very first thing heard is a brass-led

statement of the hymn tune York while the stage set shows the figure of Bunyan in prison writing

his story. This sets up both the first act and the entire morality. Vaughan Williams included this

tune when he edited The English Hymnal, where he indicates that the melody came from the

350
See Vaughan Williams, “Sir Hubert Parry,” in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, p. 296.
351
See Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pp. 351-357. A.E.F. Dickinson has also provided a musical
overview of the Pilgrim’s Progress in Vaughan Williams, pp. 358-369. It should be said, however, that this account
is largely a negative one and that many elements of the work receive unsympathetic treatment.
352
Herbert Murrill, “Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim,” in Music & Letters Vol. 32, No. 4 (Oct., 1951), p. 327.
353
Ibid.

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1615 Scottish Psalter.354 York also appears at the head of the score for the Reigate stage music as

well as in the BBC Pilgrim’s Progress music, indicating that Vaughan Williams had long

associated this tune with Bunyan’s allegory.355 Below is York as it may be seen in the English

Hymnal.

Ex. 6.1: York as presented in The English Hymnal

Most mentions of this tune in connection with the opera The Pilgrim’s Progress emphasize its

appearance in the opening, and also the concluding scene, where the Pilgrim reaches his goal and

crosses over the river of death into the Celestial City. In the latter, York features once more,

triumphantly stated in the orchestral in between choral interjections of “Holy, Holy, Holy” and

“Alleluia.” This second word appears with a musical motive one finds throughout this opera and

354
See The English Hymnal with Tunes, New Edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), edited by Percy
Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams, pp. 618-619. In the preface to the 1933 edition (the last edition that
Vaughan Williams took part in editing), Vaughan Williams gives a complete list of new tunes added for the new
edition. York is not on this list; it was one of the original tunes of the collection.
355
See Lew, ”The Pilgrim’s Progress and the pitfalls of nostalgia,” p. 180.

197
other Pilgrim-related music by Vaughan Williams, and that has been traced to another early

work, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.356

Much less often discussed, if at all, is the brief reference to York that occurs almost at the

very end of Act I, Scene I. While this may be a partial, fleeting appearance, it nonetheless comes

at a crucial point in the action. Here it works to emphasize the first and deciding moral choice of

the Pilgrim, who finally resolves to set out on the “King’s Highway” toward the Celestial City

and thereby ceases his wavering. The scene takes place directly after the prologue and shows the

Pilgrim in despair because the book in his hand tells him he will die. In this scene, as in the

others, Vaughan Williams makes necessary cuts while condensing and otherwise altering the

narrative as it is found in Bunyan’s book. Sometimes these changes drastically simplify the

action in the opera. Certain components of the setting are thus left to the imagination in the

score. One example concerns the paring-down in the first scene. The staging as indicated in the

score can sometimes disguise the fact that the opening takes place in a decidedly pastoral setting.

As Bunyan describes the surroundings, Christian (henceforth referred to as “Pilgrim” to avoid

cumbersome oscillation between terms as used across the two works) is standing in a field near

his home as the initial events unfold. When the Evangelist appears and directs the Pilgrim toward

“The Wicket Gate,” as he does in both Bunyan and Vaughan Williams, the latter neglects to

mention that the Evangelist points over “a very wide field” in the process of directing the Pilgrim

toward the gate and the “Shining Light.” A couple of other pastoral signifiers survive the

transition from Bunyan’s text to Vaughan Williams’s music in this scene. First, the four

356
For a thorough discussion on the relationship between the Tallis Fantasia and works related to The Pilgrim’s
Progress, see Lew, “The Pilgrim’s Progress and the pitfalls of nostalgia,” and Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan
Williams, p. 353. One special example of direct proof that Vaughan Williams associated the Tallis Fantasia with
Bunyan’s allegory appears in the manuscript score of the BBC Pilgrim music. The ninth number in this piece,
arriving with the words “That I may show thee the Words of God,” actually has a page of the published score of the
Tallis Fantasia cut and pasted onto the BBC manuscript at this juncture. (See British Library Add. MS. 50419, Fol.
13A.)

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neighbors of the Pilgrim (Pliable, Obstinate, Mistrust, and Timorous) take it in turns trying to

stop the Pilgrim from going on his journey, warning him of the dangers ahead. Whereupon, the

Evangelist reminds the Pilgrim in one of his interjections (which in this scene begin on an E-flat

minor chord) that the Pilgrim has already “laid thy hand to the plough.”

Ex. 6.2: Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act I, Scene I (two measures after

Rehearsal 16)

Second, upon failing to dissuade him from his journey, the four neighbors together sing “You

may have the brave country alone for me.” Perhaps these are small details, but along with the

Wicket Gate they hint at the pastoral setting and/or tone at this juncture of Bunyan’s text. Further

indication that Vaughan Williams conceived the scene along pastoral lines as suggested by

Bunyan may exist in the form of Dent’s letter to Vaughan Williams after the first performance,

where he indicates that the landscape scenery for much of the production was very English.357

There is now a context for the reference to York at the end of the first scene. Musically,

the section is dominated by the “What shall I do?” motive and its related materials.

357
See Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 201.

199
Ex. 6.3: VaughanWilliams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act I, Scene I, mm. 1-5

Moments of “diatonic relief” occur in the instances when the Evangelist responds to the

Pilgrim’s despair and/or tells him that his final salvation lies in the Celestial City. These

accompany the Pilgrim’s initial turmoil and follow the times when he hesitates. The last and only

unspoken hesitation (following the exit of the four neighbors) triggers the scene’s final response

from the Evangelist and the arrival of the brief reference to York as he speaks the words “So shalt

thou come at last to the Celestial City.” The measures shown below carry part of the tune in the

orchestra, rendered in reduced form.

Ex. 6.4: Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act I, Scene I (from three measures after

Rehearsal 18 to six measures after Rehearsal 18)

At face value, York’s partial presence here seems to point forward to the Celestial City

scene and to the Epilogue, where the Pilgrim attains his salvation. In the context of this early

scene, however, the fleeting appearance of York serves a more immediate purpose: it signals the

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end of the Pilgrim’s wavering and simultaneously marks the point at which he accepts his quest

with the full knowledge of the hardship that lies ahead. The grim determination of the Pilgrim

may be felt in the tempestuous music immediately following, where he grasps his book and sets

out, crying “Life eternal life!” The contrast here with the text and tenor of the “road” or “quest”

works from earlier in Vaughan Williams’s career could not be more apparent. Nowhere in the

Songs of Travel is there such terror, and while the Sea Symphony is perhaps equally as

exhilarating, its unbridled optimism is far removed from how Vaughan Williams shapes this

scene musically and aesthetically.358 The Pilgrim perhaps knows that salvation lies ahead at the

very end, but he also knows that he will pay dearly before he attains it. A second look at the

writings by Vaughan Williams that quote The Pilgrim’s Progress reinforces the “way of truth”

trope as presented musically in this scene, where he pointedly frames the path of salvation with

“old fashioned” diatonicism and a well-worn hymn tune.

An additional, lengthier invocation of York occurs much later, but still before the end of

the opera – at the conclusion of Act IV, Scene I. In this scene, the Pilgrim draws close to the end

of his journey. The setting is decidedly rural, with the traveler coming upon a woodcutter boy at

the edge of a forest and with the Delectable Mountains visible in the distance. The boy sings a

short and simple tune, repeating it with different words. He is joined by the Pilgrim as the latter

enters the scene and inquires as to the source of the music. The words sung match the simple

beauty of the boy’s melody, accompanied and interspersed by the clarinet. In the reduced score

excerpt of Example 6.5, the treble line in the piano corresponds to that of the clarinet in the full

score.

358
Michael Kennedy briefly calls attention to the similarity between Toward the Unknown Region, The Pilgrim’s
Progress, and other works that feature the common theme of braving unknown regions. See Kennedy, “The
Unknown Vaughan Williams,” p. 32.

201
Ex. 6.5: Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act IV, Scene I (from eight measures after

Rehearsal 1 through seventeen measures after Rehearsal 1)

This music carries certain similarities with, if not a direct resemblance to, an aria from Hubert

Parry’s oratorio Job (1892). In the first number of the second scene, a boy shepherd sings of the

flocks of his “master.” The accompanying clarinet, along with the affective and melodic

similarities of the theme, suggest that Vaughan Williams perhaps treated Parry’s music, either

consciously or subconsciously, as a model for the corresponding tune in The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Once more, much of the melodic material in Example 6.6 is marked by the clarinet, particularly

when the boy is not singing.

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Ex. 6.6: Parry, Job, Scene II, No. 1 – “The flocks of my master are blessed of God” (opening

lines)

Regardless of the creative origins of the woodcutter boy’s song, it could not be plainer

that Vaughan Williams uses this character and his music to help set up the moral lesson of the

scene. These characters contrast pointedly with the appearance of Mr. By-Ends and his wife,

both of whom enter immediately after the scene’s opening musical materials have run their

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course. The woodcutter boy himself is an addition to this series of events as set forth by Bunyan

in his allegory. When the Pilgrim encounters Mr. By-Ends in the first part of Bunyan’s The

Pilgrim’s Progress, he does so with his new companion Hopeful; Mr. By-Ends is accompanied

by certain male companions and not the wife that Vaughan Williams includes. Both the

woodcutter boy and his lyrics originally come from the second part of Bunyan’s text, where the

Pilgrim’s wife Christiana happens upon the suddenly pleasant Valley of Humiliation, years after

her husband had passed through the same place and had his encounter with Apollyon. Here the

boy is not a woodcutter but a shepherd (like Parry’s shepherd boy). Vaughan Williams

transplants this boy and his lyrics to Act IV, Scene I of his opera, changes the boy’s role from a

shepherd to a woodcutter (probably in order to avoid redundancy with the shepherds in the

following scene), and uses him as a kind of replacement for the Pilgrim’s companion Hopeful,

some of whose dialogue the boy also takes up.

By positioning the woodcutter boy in such a way, Vaughan Williams draws a stark

contrast with the morally-compromised Mr. By-Ends and his wife, pitting the boy’s humble

attitude and theme against the jauntier music accompanying the dialogue of the couple. In the

exchange between Mr. By-Ends and the Pilgrim that follows, the Pilgrim refuses the

companionship of Mr. By-Ends on the road, citing the latter’s refusal to adopt “the way of truth.”

As the Pilgrim prepares to continue on his journey, the boy points him in the direction of the

Delectable Mountains, the last stage before the Celestial City (at least in Vaughan Williams’s

opera). When the boy mentions the Celestial City, and as the Pilgrim expresses his longing to be

there, York once more makes an appearance. This time the signatory opening intervals of the

hymn tune sound for a much longer duration than at the conclusion of Act I, Scene I. The reason

204
is perhaps because the Pilgrim is at this stage much closer to his goal and has overcome all but

his last difficult obstacle.

Ex. 6.7: Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act IV, Scene I (from nine measures before

Rehearsal 12 up to Rehearsal 12)

After this reference to York, Vaughan Williams leaves it to the woodcutter boy alone to

conclude the scene much as he opened it. Upon wishing the Pilgrim a fair journey, the boy once

more collects his bundles and takes up the simple tune he sang at the beginning of the scene. The

lyrics comprise the last of the three stanzas found in Part II of Bunyan’s text:

Fullness to such a burden is,

that go on Pilgrimage,
Here little, and hereafter bliss,
Is best from age to age.

Following this there occurs a brief parting passage for solo clarinet that sounds somewhat

reminiscent of the solo violin’s music in The Lark Ascending. This reinforces the pastoral tone of

the character and scene, recalling images of a boy shepherd and an unaccompanied instrument

heard against a stage set of open rural space.

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Ex. 6.8: Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act IV, Scene I (closing measures)

Ex. 6.9: Vaughan Williams, The Lark Ascending, (solo violin passage at mm. 3-8)

The primary moral lessons of Act IV, Scene I are the Pilgrim’s steadfastness in “the way”

and a refusal to succumb to the morally relaxed worldview of Mr. By-Ends. Once more,

Vaughan Williams uses York to illustrate the Pilgrim’s refusal to veer from his course toward the

Celestial City. But the decision to transplant the boy shepherd from Part II to this particular

scene, keep the boy’s song lyrics intact, and assign to him a simple strophic song in the manner

discussed all demonstrate a concerted effort on the part of Vaughan Williams to highlight an

additional moral point: humility. What is more, in emphasizing these values – values that Herbert

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Murrill mentioned in connection with this opera as a whole – Vaughan Williams once more turns

to a familiar hymn and a simple strophic melody.359

The manner in which Vaughan Williams allots moral significance to York in connection

with the Pilgrim’s path to salvation has not gone unnoticed. A.E.F. Dickinson, in his volume on

the works of Vaughan Williams, finds the use of York in the opera to signal the Pilgrim’s final

victory “pompous” and “arbitrary,” claiming that: “There is something so derivative about the

whole conception of salvation through York as to weaken the finish.”360 Surely Dickinson could

not be further from Vaughan Williams’s own attitude and practices. The latter’s mature

compositional style owed much to hymn tunes. His advocacy for church music was scarcely

surpassed in his long career leading up to the first performance of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Also,

his use of a tune that had been with him from his early days must have seemed like a valedictory,

even moral, gesture. In short, Dickinson’s negative charge that Vaughan Williams was derivative

in assigning such significance to York in The Pilgrim’s Progress seems an unjustified indictment

for anyone to make who claims to understand his music and views. How many of Vaughan

Williams’s other compositions feature a similarly “derivative” use of a hymn or folk tune in a

prominent place?

Even where York is not heard, Vaughan Williams finds other means to emphasize the

“way of salvation” through his use of the hymn idiom, even if not through the means a specific

preexisting hymn. One part of the score characterized by such music is Act II, Scene I – The

Arming of the Pilgrim. In Bunyan’s text, this event takes place in the armory of a mansion called

359
It is noteworthy that in Vaughan Williams’s correspondence with E. J. Dent following the first performance of
the Pilgrim’s Progress in 1951, where the two discuss needed edits and improvements to the production, Dent asks
Vaughan Williams: “Could the Boy sing his hymns a little faster?” Vaughan Williams does not address this particular
question in his response to Dent, but the question itself indicates that at least one careful listener connected the
strophic tune of the Boy with the hymn idiom at the time of the premiere. Dent’s remarks, as well as Vaughan
Williams’s response, may be found in Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pp. 196-206.
360
Dickinson, Vaughan Williams, pp. 366-367.

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“House Beautiful,” which sits on top of the very Hill Difficulty mentioned by Vaughan Williams

in his written remarks on Sibelius discussed earlier.361 It is a place of respite and rejuvenation,

and Vaughan Williams preserves Bunyan’s presentation of it as such over the course of Act I,

Scene II and here at the beginning of Act II.362 Once again, both Bunyan and Vaughan Williams

invite comparisons with pastoral tropes in their use of House Beautiful. (Indeed, Vaughan

Williams insisted to Dent in their correspondence that the background to this scene and others

“represent[s] a road stretching straight out into the distance” and he also explicitly mentioned

that he liked the landscape backdrops of the House in the preceding scene.363) The “country

house” not only has a long presence in English poetry and literature (particularly visible in

poetry from the early 17th century),364 but it also has featured as a common landmark in England

for centuries. It had established itself as a fixture in the cultural and regional consciousness of

upper-class English people even by the time of Bunyan as an idealized place of hospitality and

retreat from urban strains. Both are familiar ingredients in the traditional use of the pastoral

mode as an escape. (In Bunyan’s allegory, of course, House Beautiful is not an escape from the

urban so much as a temporary escape from the burdens of the Christian journey.) The country

house was also connected with abundance.365 This aligns with the background of Vaughan

361
As one early reviewer noticed, Vaughan Williams incorporates the Interpreter from “The House of the
Interpreter” into the beginning of the House Beautiful scene, effectively combining the two houses into one. See
Martin Cooper’s review in The Spectator, quoted in Lew, “The Pilgrim’s Progress and the pitfalls of nostalgia,” pp.
191-192.
362
One difference, however, is that Vaughan Williams, in the scene description of Act I, Scene II, positions the
Wicket Gate to appear as the entry to the House Beautiful, while Bunyan’s text contains many more events and
locations between the two landmarks.
363
See Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pp. 204-205.
364
Perhaps the most famous example is Ben Jonson’s To Penshurst, published in 1616. The exact nature of the
class and other representations and sympathies in this and other country house poems have proved to be a matter
of some debate. For a summary of this divergence of opinions, see Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The
Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 285ff.
365
For further reading on the real-life evolution of the English country house from medieval times through the
twentieth century, see Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

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Williams who, as I discussed in Chapter 1, grew up in the estate house purchased by Josiah

Wegdwood – Leith Hill Place in Surrey. It is difficult to imagine that his early familiarity with

The Pilgrim’s Progress did not at some point lead him to relate Leith Hill Place to House

Beautiful somehow, seeing as each established themselves in his early consciousness.

Returning to the Arming of the Pilgrim and its relationship to the hymn idiom, one

musical idea dominates this scene – the trumpet call by a herald signaling the “King’s Highway.”

The motive sounds in its entirety after the opening five measures that carry the music over from

the previous interlude.

Ex. 6.10: Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act II, Scene I, measure 6

The words the herald uses to describe the King’s Highway come from Bunyan’s text and

instantly recall the quote in Table 6.1 where Vaughan Williams uses part of the same excerpt to

describe how Ivor Gurney followed the “good way” of a composer:

This is the King’s Highway cast up by Patriarchs and prophets

It is straight as a rule can make it.
Who will go on that way?
Other ways are crooked and wide
but the King’s Highway is straight and narrow.
He that goes that way is like to meet with weariness, peril, and
nakedness, and even death [sic].

The Pilgrim, upon hearing this invitation, volunteers to follow the path. The rest of the scene

involves the herald and a chorus who essentially cheer the Pilgrim on as he arms himself for the

road ahead. As the scene commences and the chorus establishes its increasing presence amidst

repeated trumpet calls and monophonic proclamations of the herald, Vaughan Williams assigns it

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parts of a fanfare-like melody that seem to be fashioned from the herald’s trumpet call.

Eventually, the chorus states the full version of this hymn-like theme:

Ex. 6.11: Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act II, Scene I (from three measures after

Rehearsal 4 to fourteen measures after Rehearsal 4)

The conclusion of the scene once again features the tune in full, accompanied by the herald’s

trumpet and full orchestra, effectively sending the armed Pilgrim off in a “blaze of glory.”

The following measures take the form of a transition between the arming of the Pilgrim

and the Pilgrim’s subsequent confrontation with the monstrous Apollyon. Here the fanfare tune

gradually gives way to more dissonant music. Act II, Scene II is a direct continuation of the
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interlude and begins with a loud entry in the orchestra and chorus, who have now assumed the

roles of the “doleful creatures” inhabiting the Valley of Humiliation in which the Pilgrim

confronts the dreaded monster. Vaughan Williams describes this scene in the score: “The Valley

of Humiliation, a narrow gorge shut in at the back by a bare grey hill.” The presence of the

doleful creatures combine with Vaughan Williams’s scene description and the Pilgrim’s eventual

encounter with Apollyon to paint the picture of a Scott-like Pilgrim traversing an anti-pastoral

landscape under the threat of dire danger.366 Much of the music in this scene only increases the

effect. First, the music of the doleful creatures, who wordlessly sing wail-like, descending minor

and major second motives that recall the Pilgrim’s “Save me, save me!” at the beginning of Act

I, Scene II, is almost omnipresent until Apollyon’s defeat. There is also the stark contrast and

interplay between music that colors the threat of Apollyon and references to the hymn idiom

already heard, when the Pilgrim defies him. Consider one sequence not long after the beginning

of the scene, when Apollyon first makes his presence felt, with his doleful creatures preceding

his arrival. Imposing statements of a “polychord” built from the sonorities of A-Flat minor and

G- minor signal the menacing shadow of Apollyon. Such a harmony, the reader may recall,

famously opens both the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies and is present in An Oxford Elegy.367

Also, the sudden crescendos and decrescendos of the wordless choral statements, accompanied

by the gong in the orchestra, all bear some resemblance to Vaughan Williams’s use of the wind

366
I am not the first to make the Scott-Pilgrim’s Progress comparison. Daniel Grimley compares the Scott
Expedition with the questions that the Pilgrim asks in the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountain Scene: “How far is
it hither?” and “Is the way safe or dangerous?” See Grimley, “Music, Ice, and the ‘Geometry of Fear,’” pp. 148-149,
n. 38. In the course of comparing Vaughan Williams’s film scoring project for Scott of the Antarctic to The Pilgrim’s
Progress, Jeffrey Richards refers to the film as “a secular analogue of Pilgrim’s Progress.” See Richards, Imperialism
and Music, Britain, 1876-1953 (Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 319.
367
Alain Frogley also calls attention to this type of chord – one that results from the superimposition of minor
triads separated by a half step – as it pertains to multiple themes in the Ninth Symphony. In the course of making
these and other striking observations, Frogley also points out that the same type of chord is present in the first
part of Act III, Scene II of The Pilgrim’s Progress – where the Pilgrim is in prison after his trial in Vanity Fair. See
Frogley, Vaughan Williams’s Ninth Symphony, pp. 284-285ff.

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machine in the Sinfonia antartica, as Michael Kennedy less specifically implies in his book on

Vaughan Williams.368

Ex. 6.12: Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act II, Scene II (from one measure before

Rehearsal 16c through one measure after Rehearsal 18)

The A-flat minor/G minor poly-chord appears again in the moment when Apollyon thinks he has

bested the Pilgrim in combat.

368
Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 355.

212
Ex. 6.13: Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act II, Scene II (from two measures after

Rehearsal 21 through five measures after Rehearsal 21)

All instances of this chord, as well as the musical “wailings” of the doleful creatures, clash

decidedly with the Pilgrim’s rebuffs of Apollyon leading up to the actual combat. The first of

these presents a tune that the Pilgrim will sing in a later scene (where it takes on the dimensions

of a hymn) when he finds the means to escape from prison after his episode in Vanity Fair.

213
Ex. 6.14 Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act II, Scene II (from eight measures prior

to Rehearsal 19 up to Rehearsal 19, see especially the second line)

Upon the conclusion of the combat, the Pilgrim essentially declares victory and the music

launches directly into a short statement of the “Who would true valor see” tune found in the

“Arming of the Pilgrim” scene discussed earlier. Notice the interruption of this tune in the form

of the doleful creatures hastily departing the scene, offering a last, perfunctory version of their

musical gesture.

214
Ex. 6.15: Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Act II, Scene II (Rehearsal 22 and

following)

As in the cases of the other scenes examined, Vaughan Williams here associates the

hymn idiom with the moral high ground and the Pilgrim’s victory. He positions a small amount

of the hymn-like music in such a manner that it nonetheless overshadows what many may

consider his more contemporary music in the scene. In keeping with the pattern I have been

discussing, he assigns yet another diatonic, stanzaic tune to close the act immediately after the

Pilgrim’s victory over Apollyon. The narrative picks up once more when the Pilgrim, in his own

words, grows weak because of his wounds and collapses. Whereupon, a “Heavenly Being”

appears and revives him with leaves from the “Tree of Life” and then the “Water of Life” so that

he can continue his journey. Once more, much of this tune is squarely diatonic. The fact that the

Heavenly Being sings it twice to different words serves to group it with the other simple,

diatonic tunes considered, even if it is perhaps not strictly hymn-like on account of its flowing

accompaniment. The words of the first stanza, at least, are quite pastorally suggestive.

Unto him that overcometh shall be given the Tree of Life,

Which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.
On either side of the river growth the Tree of Life,
the leaves of the tree are for thy healing.

215
Eventually the Evangelist appears again to guide the Pilgrim on his way. The scene closes in

likewise modest musical proportions as both the Evangelist and the Heavenly Being promise the

Pilgrim “The Crown of Life” if he is faithful to the end.

The music in Act II, Scene II that occurs leading up to Apollyon’s defeat illustrates

another point about this opera that merits consideration. A significant portion of the music bears

kinship with the more “dissonant” or harmonically complex, and hence more widely accepted

notions of “modern,” music that the composer produced in the 1930s and 1940s. But not all of

this music receives subordinate treatment to simpler mediums in The Pilgrim’s Progress. An

intriguing example comes from a strongly suggestive parallel with Vaughan Williams’s music

for Scott of the Antarctic that appears between the Nocturne Intermezzo and the beginning of Act

II, Scene I. Michael Kennedy was the first to point out that this brief section of The Pilgrim’s

Progress dates from Vaughan Williams’s work on the Scott film music.369 I would go further in

suggesting that the music at this juncture is perhaps a recasting of moments from the scherzo

second movement of the Sinfonia antartica, which is based substantially upon the Scott film

music. Under a new stage direction – “The stage lights up gradually behind the curtain” – this

“interlude at the end of an interlude” (my phrase) appears. The harmony suddenly changes from

a predominantly consonant framework, comprised almost entirely of major and minor triads, to

one where the tritone becomes more prominent and where rotating scales in the treble,

conforming in large part to the Lydian mode, work against triads often separated by minor

second intervals in the bass.

369
See Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. 353. In the Grove Opera article on The Pilgrim’s
Progress, Kennedy points out that Watchful’s Nocturne and the Enlargement of the Vanity Fair scene occurred in
1951-1952 before the premiere. See Kennedy, "Pilgrim’s Progress, The," in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera,
edited by Stanley Sadie. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O009443 (accessed October 11, 2010).

216
Ex. 6.16: Vaughan Williams, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Conclusion of Nocturne-Intermezzo (the

seven measures following from Rehearsal M)

Consider the melodic, harmonic, and gestural similarities between this and a sample of what

occurs at the outset of the second movement of the Sinfonia antartica.

217
Ex. 6.17: Vaughan Williams, Sinfonia antartica, Mov. II, mm. 10-13

This is likely a case of consciously recasting materials, supported by Vaughan Williams’s

habit of borrowing from his own music and even making something of a game in seeing if others

218
would notice. Hence, the question once more arises as to whether this recasting signifies

something beyond itself. Very likely, Vaughan Williams thought that this bit of seemingly Scott-

derived music would simply serve as good material to accompany the transition of scenes in

which it appears. But given what the secondary literature offers in terms of a tangible Pilgrim-

Scott connection, and given the observations that here support that notion, it is also possible that

he made a conscious decision to include a modest Scott link in a work that would serve as a

personal moral and stylistic compendium.

The presumably Scott-derived music’s placement at this precise place in the operatic

narrative is curious. It comes in perhaps the most unobtrusive, even “tucked away” location

possible. Such a position indeed seems to downplay the notion that it points to anything beyond

the practical need mentioned above. Even so, here is material that shares much with Vaughan

Williams’s Scott period but is not subject to any immediate upstaging by the hymn idiom as

occurs elsewhere in this morality. Vaughan Williams allows the end of the interlude between

Acts I and II to stand alone. It does not serve the function of coloring the doubt, conflict, or vices

leading up to a deciding “moral victory” – outcomes typically reserved in this opera for hymns or

other largely diatonic and stanzaic music. If the inclusion of this Scott-related music into an

opera dubbed “a morality” is a conscious artistic choice, and therefore a moral one, it is fair to

conclude that Vaughan Williams made purposeful, if fleeting, reference to the anti-pastoral

world of Scott and the Antarctic. In doing so, he may have fashioned some sort of moral kinship,

if not exactly moral equivalency, between Scott’s quest and that of the Pilgrim.

There is another artistic choice worth considering when contemplating the most

recognizably pastoral scene in Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. I have already

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discussed Act IV, Scene II in Chapter 4, as being a nearly wholesale transplantation of The

Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains and differing almost solely in the “crossing over the

river” portions.370 The inclusion of the Delectable Mountains scene in this “morality” would

alone establish pastoral credentials for the whole work. However, the scene emphasizes in a

different way the moral choices Vaughan Williams made in this his final completed opera.

Namely, the inclusion of virtually the whole of a much earlier composition into The Pilgrim’s

Progress demonstrates his belief that music need not be “new” to be enjoyed or have relevance

in a different setting. As with other portions of this opera, and as his writings show, he was more

concerned with what he needed at a given time and place, regardless of how old or new the

materials might be, than with their conformity to some arbitrary aesthetic or modernist standard.

One passage from his brief musical autobiography (written in 1947 and 1948 when he was

working on both the Scott and Pilgrim music) holds some relevance to this situation:

Why should music be ‘original’? The object of art is to

stretch out to ultimate realities through the medium of
beauty. The duty of the composer is to find the mot juste. It
does not matter of this word has been said a thousand times
before as long as it is the right thing to say at the moment. I
never had any conscience about cribbing.371

Reading such statements and seeing Shepherds’ place in The Pilgrim’s Progress may lead one to

ask whether Vaughan Williams was making a moral statement simply by including the former

into the latter in almost its complete original form. This is especially so since, as Nathaniel Lew

points out, Shepherds’ presence within the later opera creates some very noticeable stylistic

inconsistencies. These in turn have led to criticisms then and now that the opera is in several

370
One other very small difference involves the names of the shepherds in The Shepherds of the Delectable
Mountains versus the simple numbering (First, Second, and Third) of the shepherds in Act IV, Scene II of The
Pilgrim’s Progress.
371
Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography,” in National Music and Other Essays, p. 190.

220
ways uneven and heterogeneous. Given this, it is tempting to ask whether Vaughan Williams’s

decision to include Shepherds in such a manner stems from morally courageous impulses. Was

he, in part, making a defiant statement when he incorporated an almost unaltered work decades

old into it?

In conclusion I return to the notion that Vaughan Williams indulged in the “backward” by

producing a work such as The Pilgrim’s Progress at a time when his exploratory impulses

seemed more pronounced than they had ever been. The charge has in at least one case been

exaggerated, as when Hugh Ottaway suggested that the opera truly belongs to the period prior to

the late phase, despite being completed in 1949.372 The multiple examples of the Scott-period

music and gestures in The Pilgrim’s Progress discussed earlier, as well as their links to the Ninth

Symphony and other late works cited by Frogley, compromise such a claim. However, it remains

true, as I have shown and as Lew’s remark quoted at the outset of this chapter partially suggests,

that Vaughan Williams’s use of the hymn idiom frequently overshadows the ample presence of a

late-period manner, often in order to color the moral messages presented in several of the scenes.

While one may readily acknowledge that The Pilgrim’s Progress does not display certain

aspects of Vaughan Williams’s late music in their most obvious light, a closer glance at this

opera, in conjunction with his written statements that use Bunyan tropes as illustrative tools,

prompts us to entertain another notion: for all of its apparently conservative elements, The

Pilgrim’s Progress could only have been completed at the end of Vaughan Williams’s long

372
Ottaway, “Scott and After: The Final Phase,” p. 961. Ottaway’s date of completion is questionable for reasons
mentioned earlier. Elsewhere, he makes clear what he considers to be The Pilgrim’s Progress’s dramatic and
musical shortcomings. For example, see Ottaway, Recording Review: “Vaughan Williams: The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Noble, Herincx, Case, etc./LPO and Choir/Boult,” in The Musical Times Vol. 113, No. 1551 (May, 1972), pp. 469-470.

221
career. I return to one particular statement in his tribute to the elderly Sibelius mentioned earlier,

to further illustrate the point.

…his harmonic vocabulary is hardly different from that of

Beethoven or Schubert. Yet (or is it therefore?) his music
sounds absolutely new, and will remain new when the
twelve tones have become intolerably old-
fashioned…Sibelius has gone straight up Hill Difficulty
and has left it to others to wander to destruction in Bypath
Meadow; he will be the first to arrive at the Celestial City,
even if the others arrive at all and are not refused
admittance because they have no certificate. So up the hill
the Pilgrim goes, along the well trodden path, and there he
can find priceless jewels which perhaps only he can see and
know how to use.373

Vaughan Williams’s tribute to Sibelius – one venerable composer’s tribute to another venerable

composer – is essentially one musical pilgrim’s tribute to another. It amounts to Vaughan

Williams’s recognition that Sibelius’s path to success as a composer was similar to the one he

trod – hard won and with original results made possible by, rather than in spite of, finding

relevance in old musical traditions. Seen in this light, The Pilgrim’s Progress assumes the

character of Vaughan Williams’s very own pastoral allegory not only in the sense that it

reaffirms his lifelong value of finding continued relevance in traditional tunes, but also in its

unmistakable reflection, almost at the end of his own long life, of himself as a truth-seeking

artist. The struggles of Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim were his own; through hard work,

persistence, diligent study, and adherence to the principles he taught and defended his whole life,

he could in the end be vindicated.

Likewise, with the The Pilgrim’s Progress, Vaughan Williams once more accesses a rich

pastoral tradition to suit the artistic and personal concerns of a particular stage in his life. It is

fitting that the pastoral as moral allegory is discernable at this point in his long career. Until then
373
Vaughan Williams, “Sibelius,” p. 261.

222
he lacked the complete experience necessary to look back upon a full life in such a

comprehensive and retrospective manner. In this light, the facts that the work draws upon music

from throughout his life, and that it was finished only at the end of it, become significant. If there

was a period in which it was appropriate for Vaughan Williams to produce an opera that

intersects with the literary pastoral tradition of moral allegory, it was precisely when he did. In

this respect, at least, The Pilgrim’s Progress belongs entirely to the time in which all of its parts

appeared presented as a whole.

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 Epilogue

The preceding pages offer a broad survey of significant ways in which Vaughan

Williams’s musical endeavors intersect with the pastoral mode. Chapter 1 identified major

pastoral themes in his career and music, compared them to broad cultural and historical

conceptions of the pastoral mode, and outlined major obstacles that arise when negotiating the

two. Chapter 2 argued that Vaughan Williams’s favorite novel, George Borrow’s Lavengro,

influenced his early views on folksong and formed part of a larger cultural climate in which the

countryside was sometimes seen as a source of clues to past origins. Chapter 3 discussed

Vaughan Williams’s early pastoral music in light of pre-Great War English optimism, and his

own formative preoccupations. Chapters 4 and 5 explored the elegiac mode and the multiple

ways in which it is present in the composer’s pastoral music following the two wars. Finally,

Chapter 6 showed how his treasured lifelong project, The Pilgrim’s Progress, is in many ways

not only the composer’s very own personal and artistic testament, but also a rich musical

morality tale in the tradition of the pastoral allegory.

With all of these discussions I have nonetheless only scratched the surface of my topic.

In a recent book review, Byron Adams made the following perceptive comment: “One of the

mysterious aspects of Vaughan Williams’s achievement is that, as more and more information

becomes available about his life and music, the ambiguity surrounding his beliefs, aesthetics, and

character only deepens.”374 As I reflect upon the chapters offered here, I cannot help but

contemplate these words as one may apply them to Vaughan Williams and the pastoral mode.

After writing this dissertation, I am left with more questions than answers. For example, when

were discernable “pastoral” patterns in his compositions the result of conscious decisions to

374
Adams, Book Review: “Hugh Cobbe, ed., The Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958 (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008) in Twentieth-Century Music Vol. 6, No. 2 (Sep, 2009): p. 264.

224
write such associated music? When were they the result of less premeditated and more

sublimated responses to his own experiences and to the many layers of tradition that influenced

him? To some extent these questions may be unanswerable. But it is clear that much more work

remains to be done. One of the larger areas of further research that I have left largely unplumbed

is the relationship of Vaughan Williams’s pastoral music to that produced by his contemporaries

and younger colleagues. How, for instance, does Vaughan Williams’s encounters with the

pastoral mode relate to Moeran’s, Finzi’s, and others’? How do their personal takes on the

pastoral mode likewise relate to the past conventions discussed here in ways that may differ from

or align with those of Vaughan Williams?

While many authors have lent to our understanding of Vaughan Williams and

nationalism, and other points of focus, it will take more than the limited perspective of one or a

few people before we begin to arrive at a broad understanding of Vaughan Williams and the

pastoral mode. If the recent spate of Vaughan Williams scholarship is any indication, even then

much new information and analysis may arrive that both provides new insights and yet leaves

much more to be discovered. Adams’s expressed pattern stands a good chance of being the norm

for a long while to come.

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Appendix A: A List of Pastoral-Related Works by Vaughan Williams

Composition Years
Completed
Echo’s Lament of Narcissus (Madrigal for Choir, 1895-1896
text by Jonson)
The Splendour Falls (Song, text by Alfred Abt. 1896
Tennyson)
How Can the Tree but Whither? (Song, text by 1898
Vaux)
Claribel (Song, text by Tennyson) 1898
The Garden of Prosperine (Choir and Orchestra, 1899
text by Swinburne)
Bucolic Suite (Orchestra) 1900
Linden Lea (Song, text by Barnes) 1901
Blackmwore by the Stour (Song, text by William 1902
Barnes)
Tears, Idle Tears (Song, text by Tennyson) 1902
When I am Dead, My Dearest (Song, text by C. Abt. 1903
Rossetti)
The Winter’s Willow (Song, text by Barnes) Abt. 1903
Silent Noon (Song, text by D.G. Rossetti) 1903
Willow-Wood (Song, later Cantata for baritone and 1903, 1909
orchestra; text by D.G. Rossetti)
Sound Sleep (Song, text by C. Rossetti) 1903
Orpheus With His Lute (Song, text by 1903
Shakespeare)
In the Fen Country (Orchestra) 1904
The House of Life (Song Cycle inc. Silent Noon, 1904
texts by D.G. Rossetti)
Songs of Travel (Song Cycle, texts by R.L. 1904
Stevenson)
Dreamland (Song, text by C. Rossetti) 1904
Orchestral Impressions (Harnham Down and The 1904-1907
Solent completed)
Pan’s Anniversary (Incidental Music for Jonson’s 1905
Masque, produced in collaboration with Gustav
Holst)
Norfolk Rhapsodies 1-3 (Only No. 1 survives) 1906
Toward the Unknown Region (Song for Chorus 1907
and Orchestra, text by Whitman)
The Sky Above the Roof (Song, text by Paul 1908
Verlaine)
On Wenlock Edge (Song Cycle, texts by A.E. 1909
Housman)

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Romance and Pastoral for Violin and Piano Before
1914
The Lark Ascending (Romance for Violin and 1914
Orchestra or Violin and Piano, after a poem by (Revised
George Meredith) 1920)
Hugh the Drover (Opera in Two Acts, libretto by 1914
Harold Child) (Revised
afterward)
A Pastoral Symphony (No. 3) (Orchestra and 1921
Wordless Soloist)
Four Poems by Fredegond Shove (Songs) Abt. 1922

The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains 1923

(Pastoral Episode in 1 Act, after Bunyan)
Old King Cole (Ballet) 1923

Flos Campi (Suite for Solo Viola, Mixed Wordless 1925

Chorus, and Small Orchestra; texts from the Old
Testament Book Song of Solomon)
“Orpheus With His Lute” (second setting) from 1925
Three Songs from Shakespeare (Song)
Two Poems by Seumas O’Sullivan (Songs) 1925

Three Poems by Walt Whitman (Songs) Abt. 1925

Along the Field (Song Cycle, texts by A.E. 1927

Housman)
Job (Masque, story based on Old Testament Book 1930
of Job)
Film Music for The Loves of Joanna Godden 1946

An Oxford Elegy (for Speaker, Mixed Chorus, and 1949

Small Orchestra; texts by Matthew Arnold)
The Pilgrim’s Progress and related works 1951
(Morality in 4 Acts with Prologue and Epilogue,
adapted from Bunyan)
“Hill Over Dale” (From Three Shakespeare Songs) 1951

In the Spring (Song, text by William Barnes) 1952

Hodie (This Day) (Christmas Cantata, Various 1954

texts)
Symphony No. 9 in E Minor (surviving 1956
manuscripts bear references to Hardy’s Tess of the

227
d’Urbervilles)

Ten Blake Songs (Songs for Oboe and Piano) 1957

228
Appendix B: Linden Lea Texts (Barnes)

Standard English Text Used by Vaughan Williams in his 1901 Song

Within the woodlands, flow'ry gladed,

By the oak trees' mossy moot,
The shining grass blades, timber-shaded,
Now do quiver underfoot;
And birds do whistle overhead,
And water's bubbling in its bed;
And there, for me, the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

When leaves, that lately were a-springing,

Now do fade within the copse,
And painted birds do hush their singing,
Up upon the timber tops;
And brown-leaved fruits a-turning red,
In cloudless sunshine overhead,
With fruit for me, the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

Let other folk make money faster

In the air of dark-roomed towns;
I don't dread a peevish master,
Though no man may heed my frowns.
I be free to go abroad,
Or take again my homeward road
To where, for me, the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

Original Version of the Poem Using the Dorset Dialect

'Ithin the woodlands, flow'ry glëaded,

By the woak trees’ mossy moot,
The sheened grass blëades, timber-shëaded,
Now do quiver under voot;
An' birds do whissle over head,
An' water's bubblen in its bed,
An' there vor me the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

When leaves that lëately were a-springen

Now do fade 'ithin the copse,
An' painted birds do hush their singen
Up upon the timber tops;

229
An' brown leaved fruit's a-turnen red,
In cloudless zunsheen, auverhead,
Wi' fruit vor me, the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

Let other vo'k mëake money vaster

In the air o' dark-room'd towns,
I don't dread a peevish mëaster;
Though noo man do heed my frowns.
I be free to goo abrode,
Or teake agëan my hwomeward road
To where, vor me, the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

(Source: Vaughan Williams, Linden Lea, Boosey & Co. Ltd., 1912)

230
Appendix C: The New Ghost (Fredegond Shove, 1918)

And he cast it down, down, on the green grass,

Over the young crocuses, where the dew was.
He cast the garment of his flesh that was full of death,
And like a sword his spirit showed out of the cold sheath.

He went a pace or two, he went to meet his Lord

And, as I said, his spirit looked like a clean sword,
And seeing him the naked trees began shivering
And all the birds cried out aloud as it were late spring.

And the Lord came on, He came down, and saw

That a soul was waiting there for Him, one without flaw,
And they embraced in the churchyard where the robins play,
And the daffodils hang down their heads, as they burn away.

The Lord held his head fast, and you could see
That He kissed the unsheathed ghost that was gone free
As a hot sun, on a March day, kisses the cold ground;
And the spirit answered, for he knew well that his peace was found.

The spirit trembled, and sprang up at the Lord's word,

As on a wild April day, springs a small bird,
So the ghost's feet lifting him up, he kissed the Lord's cheek,
And for the greatness of their love neither of them could speak.

But the Lord went then, to show him the way,

Over the young crocuses, under the green may
That was not quite in flower yet, to a far distant land:
And the ghost followed like a naked cloud holding the sun's hand.

231
Appendix D: The Water Mill (Fredegond Shove, 1918)

There is a mill, an ancient one,

Brown with rain, and dry with sun,
The miller's house is joined with it,
And in July the swallows flit
To and fro, in and out,
Round the windows, all about;
The mill wheel whirrs and the waters roar
Out of the dark arch by the door,
The willows toss their silver heads,
And the phloxes in the garden beds
Turn red, turn grey,
With the time of day,
And smell sweet in the rain, then die away.

The miller's cat is a tabby, she

Is as lean as a healthy cat can be,
She plays in the loft where the sunbeams stroke
The sacks' fat backs, and beetles choke
In the floury dust. The Wheel goes round
And the miller's wife sleeps fast and sound.

There is a clock inside the house,

Very tall and very bright,
It strikes the hour when shadows drowse,
Or showers make the windows white;
Loud and sweet, in rain and sun,
The clock strikes, and the work is done.
The miller's wife and his eldest girl
Clean and cook, while the mill wheels whirl.
The children take their meat to school,
And at dusk they play by the twilit pool;
Bare-foot, bare-head,
Till the day is dead,
And their mother calls them in to bed.

The supper stands on the clean-scrubbed board,

And the miller drinks like a thirsty lord;
The young men come for their daughter's sake,
But she never knows which one to take;
She drives her needle, and pins her stuff,
While the moon shines gold, and the lamp shines buff.

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Appendix E: Flos Campi Epigraphs (With King James Translations/Verse Numbers)

Published Score

Movement 1: Sicut Lilium inter spinas, sic amica mea inter filias…Fulcite me floribus, stipate
me malis, quia amore langueo. ("As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters…
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples; for I am sick with love."---Song of Solomon
2:2,5)

Movement 2: Jam enim hiems transiit; imber abiit, et recessit; Flores apparuerunt in terra
nostra, Tempus putationis advenit; Vox turturis audita est in terra nostra. ("For, lo, the winter is
past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is
come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."---Song of Solomon 2:11-12)

Movement 3: Quaesivi quem diligit anima mea; quaesivi illum, et non inveni . . . 'Adjuro vos,
filiae Jerusalem, si inveneritis dilectum meum, ut nuntietis et quia amore langueo' . . . Quo abiit
dilectus tuus, O pulcherrima mulierum? Quo declinavit dilectus tuus? et quaeremus eum tecum.
("I sought him whom my soul loveth, but I found him not…'I charge you, O daughters of
Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him I am sick with love'…Whither is thy beloved
gone, O thou fairest among women? Whither is thy beloved turned aside? that we may seek him
with thee."---Song of Solomon 3:1, 5:8, 6:1)

Movement 4: En lectulum Salomonis sexaginta fortes ambiunt…omnes tenentes gladios, et ad

bella doctissimi. ("Behold his bed [palanquin], which is Solomon's, three score valiant men are
about it…They all hold swords, being expert in war."---Song of Solomon 3:7-8)

Movement 5: Revertere, revertere Sulamitis! Revertere, revertere ut intueamur te…Quam

pulchri sunt gressus tui in calceamentis, filia principis. ("Return, return, O Shulamite! Return,
return, that we may look upon thee…How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O Prince's
daughter."---Song of Solomon 6:13, 7:1)

Movement 6: Pone me ut signaculum super cor tuum. ("Set me as a seal upon thine heart."---
Song of Solomon 8:6a)

Crossed-out Epigraph in Ms.Mus. 1584

Movement 6: Capite nobis vulpes vulpes parvulas quae demoliuntur vineas nam vinea nostra
floruit. (“Take us the foxes, the little foxes, That spoil the vines: for our vines have tender
grapes.”---Song of Solomon 2:15)

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Appendix F: Vaughan Williams’s Adapted Text for An Oxford Elegy and the Original
Poems by Matthew Arnold

Vaughan Williams’s Adapted Text for An Oxford Elegy (Taken from Matthew Arnold’s The
Scholar-Gipsy and Thyrsis)

Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill;

Go, Shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes:
No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,
Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
Nor the cropp'd grasses shoot another head.
But when the fields are still,
And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,
And only the white sheep are sometimes seen
Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch'd green;
Come Shepherd, and again begin the quest.

Here will I sit and wait,

While to my ear from uplands far away
The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,
With distant cries of reapers in the corn-
All the live murmur of a summer's day.
(Here will I sit and wait,
While to my ear from uplands far away
The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,
With distant cries of reapers in the corn-
All the live murmur of a summer's day.)

Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field,

And here till sun-down, Shepherd, will I be.
Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep;
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers,
That sweet city with her dreaming spires;
She needs not summer for beauty's heightening:
Lovely all times she lies, lovely today.

Come, let me read the oft-read tale again:

The story of that Oxford scholar poor,
Who, one summer morn forsook his friends,
And came, as most men deem'd, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

234
But rumours hung about the country-side,
That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,
Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,
And I myself seem half to know thy looks,
And put the shepherds, Wanderer, on thy trace;

Or in my boat I lie
Moor'd to the cool bank in the summer heats,
'Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,
And watch the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills,
And wonder if thou haunt'st their shy retreats.
Leaning backwards in a pensive dream,
And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers
Pluck'd in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers,
And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream.
Still waiting for the spark from Heaven to fall.

And once, in winter, on the causeway chill

Where home through flooded fields foot-travellers go,
Have I not pass'd thee on the wooden bridge
Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow,
Thy face tow’rd Hinksey and its wintry ridge?
And thou hast climb'd the hill
And gain'd the white brow of the Cumnor range;
Turn'd once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall,
The line of festal light in Christ Church hall—
Then sought thy straw in some sequester'd grange.

But what— I dream! Two hundred years are flown;

And thou from earth art gone
Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid—
Some country-nook, where o'er thy unknown grave
Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave—
Under a dark, red-fruited yew-tree's shade.

No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours.

Thou waitest for the spark from Heaven! and we,
Ah, do not we, Wanderer, await it too?
See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar men
Today from Oxford, up your pathway strays!
Here came I often, often, in old days;
Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm,

Up past the Wood, to where the elm-tree crowns
The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames?

235
The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs,
The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames?—
That single elm-tree bright
Against the west—I miss it! is it gone?
We prized it dearly; while it stood, we said,
Our friend, the Scholar Gipsy, was not dead;
While the tree lived, he in these fields lived on.
Needs must I, with heavy heart
Into the world and wave of men depart;
But Thyrsis of his own will went away.

So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,

From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!
Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?

Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,

Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
Sweet-William with his homely cottage smell,
And stocks in fragrant blow;
Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,
And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,
And the full moon, and the white evening-star.

He hearkens not! light comer, he is flown!

What matters it? next year he will return,
And we shall have him in the sweet spring-days,
With whitening hedges, and uncrumpling fern,
And blue-bells trembling by the forest-ways,
And scent of hay new-mown.
(He will return.)
But Thyrsis never more we swains shall see.
(Never more.)

Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour

In the old haunt; and find our tree-topped hill.
I know these slopes; who knows them if not I?—
But many a dingle on the loved hill-side,
With thorns once studded, old, white-blossom'd trees,
Where thick the cowslips grew, and far descried,
High tower’d the spikes of purple orchises,
Hath since our day put by
The coronals of that forgotten time.

236
They are all gone, and thou art gone as well.

Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night

In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.
I see her veil draw soft across the day,
And long the way appears which seem'd so short,
And high the mountain tops, in cloudy air,
The mountain tops where is the throne of Truth!

There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here

Sole in these fields; yet will I not despair;
Despair I will not, while I yet descry
That lonely Tree against the western sky.
Fields where soft sheep from cages pull the hay,
Woods with anemonies in flower till May,
Know him a wanderer still.
(Roam on!)
Then let in thy voice a whisper often come
To chase fatigue and fear.

Why faintest thou! I wander'd till I died.

Roam on! the light we sought is shining still.
Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.
(Why faintest thou! I wander'd till I died.
Roam on! the light we sought is shining still.
Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.)

The Scholar-Gipsy (Matthew Arnold, 1853)

Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill;

Go, Shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes:
No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,
Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
Nor the cropp'd grasses shoot another head.
But when the fields are still,
And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,
And only the white sheep are sometimes seen
Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch'd green;
Come Shepherd, and again begin the quest.

Here, where the reaper was at work of late,

In this high field's dark corner, where he leaves

237
His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruise,
And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,
Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use;
Here will I sit and wait,
While to my ear from uplands far away
The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,
With distant cries of reapers in the corn—
All the live murmur of a summer's day.

Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field,

And here till sundown, Shepherd, will I be.
Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep:
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers:

And near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book—

Come, let me read the oft-read tale again:
The story of that Oxford scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking at Preferment's door,
One summer morn forsook
His friends, and went to learn the Gipsy lore,
And roam'd the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deem'd, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

But once, years after, in the country lanes,

Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew,
Met him, and of his way of life inquired.
Whereat he answer'd that the Gipsy crew,
His mates, had arts to rule as they desired
The workings of men's brains;
And they can bind them to what thoughts they will:
'And I,' he said, 'the secret of their art,
When fully learn'd, will to the world impart:
But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill!'

This said, he left them, and return'd no more,

But rumours hung about the country-side,
That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,
Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,

238
In hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey,
The same the Gipsies wore.
Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring;
At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors,
On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frock'd boors
Had found him seated at their entering,

But 'mid their drink and clatter, he would fly:

And I myself seem half to know thy looks,
And put the shepherds, Wanderer, on thy trace;
And boys who in lone wheatfields scare the rooks
I ask if thou hast pass'd their quiet place;
Or in my boat I lie
Moor'd to the cool bank in the summer heats,
'Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,
And watch the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills,
And wonder if thou haunt'st their shy retreats.

For most, I know, thou lov'st retirèd ground.

Thee, at the ferry, Oxford riders blithe,
Returning home on summer nights, have met
Crossing the stripling Thames at Bablock-hithe,
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,
As the slow punt swings round:
And leaning backwards in a pensive dream,
And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers
Pluck'd in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers,
And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream:

And then they land, and thou art seen no more.

Maidens who from the distant hamlets come
To dance around the Fyfield elm in May,
Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam,
Or cross a stile into the public way.
Oft thou hast given them store
Of flowers – the frail-leaf'd, white anemone—
Dark bluebells drench'd with dews of summer eves,
And purple orchises with spotted leaves—
But none has words she can report of thee.

And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here

In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames,
Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass
Where black-wing'd swallows haunt the glittering Thames,
To bathe in the abandon'd lasher pass,
Have often pass'd thee near

239
Sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown:
Mark'd thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare,
Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air;
But, when they came from bathing, thou wert gone.

At some lone homestead in the Cumnor hills,

Where at her open door the housewife darns,
Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate
To watch the threshers in the mossy barns.
Children, who early range these slopes and late
For cresses from the rills,
Have known thee watching, all an April day,
The springing pastures and the feeding kine;
And mark'd thee, when the stars come out and shine,
Through the long dewy grass move slow away.

In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood,

Where most the Gipsies by the turf-edged way
Pitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see
With scarlet patches tagg'd and shreds of gray,
Above the forest-ground call'd Thessaly—
The blackbird picking food
Sees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all;
So often has he known thee past him stray
Rapt, twirling in thy hand a wither'd spray,
And waiting for the spark from Heaven to fall.

And once, in winter, on the causeway chill

Where home through flooded fields foot-travellers go,
Have I not pass'd thee on the wooden bridge
Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow,
Thy face towards Hinksey and its wintry ridge?
And thou hast climb'd the hill
And gain'd the white brow of the Cumnor range;
Turn'd once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall,
The line of festal light in Christ Church hall—
Then sought thy straw in some sequester'd grange.

But what—I dream! Two hundred years are flown

Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls,
And the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe
That thou wert wander'd from the studious walls
To learn strange arts, and join a Gipsy tribe:
And thou from earth art gone
Long since and in some quiet churchyard laid;
Some country nook, where o'er thy unknown grave

240
Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave—
Under a dark red-fruited yew-tree's shade.

—No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours.

For what wears out the life of mortal men?
'Tis that from change to change their being rolls:
'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,
Exhaust the energy of strongest souls,
And numb the elastic powers.
Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen,
And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit,
To the just-pausing Genius we remit
Our worn-out life, and are – what we have been.

Thou hast not lived, why shouldst thou perish, so?

Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire:
Else wert thou long since number'd with the dead—
Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire.
The generations of thy peers are fled,
And we ourselves shall go;
But thou possessest an immortal lot,
And we imagine thee exempt from age
And living as thou liv'st on Glanvil's page,
Because thou hadst – what we, alas, have not!

For early didst thou leave the world, with powers

Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.
O Life unlike to ours!
Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,
Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,
And each half lives a hundred different lives;
Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.

Thou waitest for the spark from Heaven: and we,

Vague half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose weak resolves never have been fulfill'd;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day—
Ah, do not we, Wanderer, await it too?

241
Yes, we await it, but it still delays,
And then we suffer; and amongst us One,
Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne;
And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days;
Tells us his misery's birth and growth and signs,
And how the dying spark of hope was fed,
And how the breast was soothed, and how the head,
And all his hourly varied anodynes.

This for our wisest: and we others pine,

And wish the long unhappy dream would end,
And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear,
With close-lipp'd Patience for our only friend,
Sad Patience, too near neighbour to Despair:
But none has hope like thine.
Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray,
Roaming the country-side, a truant boy,
Nursing thy project in unclouded joy,
And every doubt long blown by time away.

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,

And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife—
Fly hence, our contact fear!
Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!
Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern
From her false friend's approach in Hades turn,
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude.

Still nursing the unconquerable hope,

Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silver'd branches of the glade—
Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,
On some mild pastoral slope
Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales,
Freshen they flowers, as in former years,
With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark dingles, to the nightingales.

But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!

For strong the infection of our mental strife,

242
Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;
And we should win thee from they own fair life,
Like us distracted, and like us unblest.
Soon, soon thy cheer would die,
Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix'd they powers,
And they clear aims be cross and shifting made:
And then thy glad perennial youth would fade,
Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.

Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!

—As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-hair'd creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the Aegean isles;
And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green bursting figs, and tunnies steep'd in brine;
And knew the intruders on his ancient home,

The young light-hearted Masters of the waves;

And snatch'd his rudder, and shook out more sail,
And day and night held on indignantly
O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale,
Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,
To where the Atlantic raves
Outside the Western Straits, and unbent sails
There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,
Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;
And on the beach undid his corded bales.

Thyrsis (Matthew Arnold, 1865)

How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!

In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;
The village street its haunted mansion lacks,
And from the sign is gone Sibylla's name,
And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks--
Are ye too changed, ye hills?
See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar men
To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays!
Here came I often, often, in old days--
Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

243
Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm,
Past the high wood, to where the elm-tree crowns
The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames?
The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs,
The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames?--
This winter-eve is warm,
Humid the air! leafless, yet soft as spring,
The tender purple spray on copse and briers!
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening,

Lovely all times she lies, lovely to-night!--

Only, methinks, some loss of habit's power
Befalls me wandering through this upland dim.
Once passed I blindfold here, at any hour;
Now seldom come I, since I came with him.
That single elm-tree bright
Against the west - I miss it! is it goner?
We prized it dearly; while it stood, we said,
Our friend, the Gipsy-Scholar, was not dead;
While the tree lived, he in these fields lived on.

Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here,

But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick;
And with the country-folk acquaintance made
By barn in threshing-time, by new-built rick.
Here, too, our shepherd-pipes we first assayed.
Ah me! this many a year
My pipe is lost, my shepherd's holiday!
Needs must I lose them, needs with heavy heart
Into the world and wave of men depart;
But Thyrsis of his own will went away.

It irked him to be here, he could not rest.

He loved each simple joy the country yields,
He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep,
For that a shadow loured on the fields,
Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.
Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and fill'd his head.
He went; his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground;
He could not wait their passing, he is dead.

So, some tempestuous morn in early June,

When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er,

244
Before the roses and the longest day--
When garden-walks and all the grassy floor
With blossoms red and white of fallen May
And chestnut-flowers are strewn--
So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?

Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell,
And stocks in fragrant blow;
Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,
And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,
And the full moon, and the white evening-star.

He hearkens not! light comer, he is flown!

What matters it? next year he will return,
And we shall have him in the sweet spring-days,
With whitening hedges, and uncrumpling fern,
And blue-bells trembling by the forest-ways,
And scent of hay new-mown.
But Thyrsis never more we swains shall see;
See him come back, and cut a smoother reed,
And blow a strain the world at last shall heed--
For Time, not Corydon, hath conquered thee!

Alack, for Corydon no rival now!--

But when Sicilian shepherds lost a mate,
Some good survivor with his flute would go,
Piping a ditty sad for Bion's fate;
And cross the unpermitted ferry's flow,
And relax Pluto's brow,
And make leap up with joy the beauteous head
Of Proserpine, among whose crowned hair
Are flowers first opened on Sicilian air,
And flute his friend, like Orpheus, from the dead.

O easy access to the hearer's grace

When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine!
For she herself had trod Sicilian fields,
She knew the Dorian water's gush divine,

245
She knew each lily white which Enna yields
Each rose with blushing face;
She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain.
But ah, of our poor Thames she never heard!
Her foot the Cumner cowslips never stirr'd;
And we should tease her with our plaint in vain!

Well! wind-dispersed and vain the words will be,

Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour
In the old haunt, and find our tree-topp'd hill!
Who, if not I, for questing here hath power?
I know the wood which hides the daffodil,
I know the Fyfield tree,
I know what white, what purple fritillaries
The grassy harvest of the river-fields,
Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields,
And what sedged brooks are Thames's tributaries;

I know these slopes; who knows them if not I?--

But many a tingle on the loved hillside,
With thorns once studded, old, white-blossom'd trees,
Where thick the cowslips grew, and far descried
High towered the spikes of purple orchises,
Hath since our day put by
The coronals of that forgotten time;
Down each green bank hath gone the ploughboy's team,
And only in the hidden brookside gleam
Primroses, orphans of the flowery prime.

Where is the girl, who by the boatman's door,

Above the locks, above the boating throng,
Unmoored our skiff when through the Wytham flats,
Red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet among
And darting swallows and light water-gnats,
We tracked the shy Thames shore?
Where are the mowers, who, as the tiny swell
Of our boat passing heaved the river-grass,
Stood with suspended scythe to see us pass?--
They all are gone, and thou art gone as well!

Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night

In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.
I see her veil draw soft across the day,
I feel her slowly chilling breath invade
The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with grey;
I feel her finger light

246
Laid pausefully upon life's headlong train; --
The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,
The heart less bounding at emotion new,
And hope, once crush'd, less quick to spring again.

And long the way appears, which seem'd so short

To the less practised eye of sanguine youth;
And high the mountain-tops, in cloudy air,
The mountain-tops where is the throne of Truth,
Tops in life's morning-sun so bright and bare!
Unbreachable the fort
Of the long-batter'd world uplifts its wall;
And strange and vain the earthly turmoil grows,
And near and real the charm of thy repose,
And night as welcome as a friend would fall.

But hush! the upland hath a sudden loss

Of quiet! - Look, adown the dusk hill-side,
A troop of Oxford hunters going home,
As in old days, jovial and talking, ride!
From hunting with the Berkshire hounds they come.
Quick! let me fly, and cross
Into yon farther field! - 'Tis done; and see,
Backed by the sunset, which doth glorify
The orange and pale violet evening-sky,
Bare on its lonely ridge, the Tree! the Tree!

I take the omen! Eve lets down her veil,

The white fog creeps from bush to bush about,
The west unflushes, the high stars grow bright,
And in the scatter'd farms the lights come out.
I cannot reach the signal-tree to-night,
Yet, happy omen, hail!
Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno-vale
(For there thine earth forgetting eyelids keep
The morningless and unawakening sleep
Under the flowery oleanders pale),

Hear it, O Thyrsis, still our tree is there!--

Ah, vain! These English fields, this upland dim,
These brambles pale with mist engarlanded,
That lone, sky-pointing tree, are not for him;
To a boon southern country he is fled,
And now in happier air,
Wandering with the great Mother's train divine
(And purer or more subtle soul than thee,

247
I trow, the mighty Mother doth not see)
Within a folding of the Apennine,

Thou hearest the immortal chants of old!--

Putting his sickle to the perilous grain
In the hot cornfield of the Phrygian king,
For thee the Lityerses-song again
Young Daphnis with his silver voice doth sing;
Sings his Sicilian fold,
His sheep, his hapless love, his blinded eyes--
And how a call celestial round him rang,
And heavenward from the fountain-brink he sprang,
And all the marvel of the golden skies.

There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here

Sole in these fields! yet will I not despair.
Despair I will not, while I yet descry
'Neath the mild canopy of English air
That lonely tree against the western sky.
Still, still these slopes, 'tis clear,
Our Gipsy-Scholar haunts, outliving thee!
Fields where soft sheep from cages pull the hay,
Woods with anemonies in flower till May,
Know him a wanderer still; then why not me?

A fugitive and gracious light he seeks,

Shy to illumine; and I seek it too.
This does not come with houses or with gold,
With place, with honour, and a flattering crew;
'Tis not in the world's market bought and sold--
But the smooth-slipping weeks
Drop by, and leave its seeker still untired;
Out of the heed of mortals he is gone,
He wends unfollowed, he must house alone;
Yet on he fares, by his own heart inspired.

Thou too, O Thyrsis, on like quest wast bound;

Thou wanderedst with me for a little hour!
Men gave thee nothing; but this happy quest,
If men esteem'd thee feeble, gave thee power,
If men procured thee trouble, gave thee rest.
And this rude Cumner ground,
Its fir-topped Hurst, its farms, its quiet fields,
Here cams't thou in thy jocund youthful time,
Here was thine height of strength, thy golden prime!
And still the haunt beloved a virtue yields.

248
What though the music of thy rustic flute
Kept not for long its happy, country tone;
Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note
Of men contention-tost, of men who groan,
Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat--
It failed, and thou wage mute!
Yet hadst thou always visions of our light,
And long with men of care thou couldst not stay,
And soon thy foot resumed its wandering way,
Left human haunt, and on alone till night.

Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here!

'Mid city-noise, not, as with thee of yore,
Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home.
Then through the great town's harsh, heart-wearying roar,
Let in thy voice a whisper often come,
To chase fatigue and fear:
Why faintest thou! I wander'd till I died.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side.

249
 Selected Bibliography

Aarsleff, Hans. The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860. London: The Athlone Press.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1983.

Adams, Byron and Robin Wells, eds. Vaughan Williams Essays. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2003.

Armstrong, Isobel, ed. The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press. 1969.

Banfield, Stephen. Gerald Finzi: An English Composer. London: Faber and Faber. 1997.

Banks, Chris et al. Sundry sorts of music books: Essays on The British Library Collections.
London: The British Library. 1993.

Beckerman, Michael. “The Composer as Pole Seeker: Reading Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia
antartica.” Current Musicology No. 69 (Spring, 2000): 42-67.

Borris, Kenneth. Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic form in Sidney,
Spenser, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000.

Boyes, Georgina. The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival. Music
and Society Series. Edited by Pete Martin. Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press. 1993.

Cooper, Helen. Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance. Ipswitch, UK: D.S. Brewer Ltd., and
Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. 1977.

Day, James. Vaughan Williams. The Master Musicians Series, ed. Stanley Sadie. Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press. 1998.

Dickinson, A.E.F. Vaughan Williams. London: Faber and Faber. 1963.

Douglas, Roy. Working With R.V.W. Oxford University Press. 1972.

Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. New York: New Directions Publishing
Corporation. 1968.

Foss, Hubert. Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study. New York: Oxford University Press. 1950.

Frogley, Alain. Vaughan Williams’s Ninth Symphony. Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure.
Edited by Malcolm Gillies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001.

Frogley, Alain, ed. Vaughan Williams Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000.

250
Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. The New Critical Idiom Series. Edited by John Drakakis. London and
New York: Routledge. 1999.

Grimley, Daniel M. “Music, Ice, and the ‘Geometry of Fear’: The Landscapes of Ralph Vaughan
Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica.” The Musical Quarterly Vol. 91 (Spring-Summer, 2008):
116-150.

Hatten, Robert S. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven,
Schubert. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2004.

Hold, Trevor. Parry to Finzi: Twenty English Song Composers. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.
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Howells, Herbert. “Vaughan Williams’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony.” Music & Letters Vol. 3, No. 2
(April, 1922): 122-132.

Howes, Frank. The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. London: Oxford University Press. 1954.

Karpeles, Maud. An Introduction to English Folk Song. London: Oxford University Press. 1973.

Kennedy, David. Elegy. The New Critical Idiom Series. New York: Routledge. 2007.

Kennedy, Michael. “The Unknown Vaughan Williams.” Proceedings of the Royal Music
Association Vol. 99 (1972-1973): 31-41.

The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Second Edition. London: Oxford

University Press. 1980.

Lambert, Constant. Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline. Third Edition. London: Faber and
Faber. 1948.

Leeming, David Adams and Kathleen Morgan Drowne. The Encyclopedia of Allegorical
Literature. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. 1996.

Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, and London: Geoffrey Cumberlege. 1936.

Manning, David, ed. Vaughan Williams on Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press. 2008.

Marinelli, Peter V. Pastoral. The Critical Idiom Series. Edited by John D. Jump. London:
Methuen & Co. Ltd. 1971.

Marsh, Jan. Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England, from 1880 to 1914.
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251
Mellers, Wilfrid. Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion. London: Barrie & Jenkins. 1989.

Mingay, G.E., ed. The Victorian Countryside. Two Volumes. London: Routledge and Kegan
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Newman, Ernest. “An Oxford Elegy.” The Sunday Times. 12 April 1953.

Nord, Deborah Epstein. Gypsies & the British Imagination, 1807-1930. New York: Columbia
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Norris, Christopher, ed. Music and the Politics of Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1989.

Ottaway, Hugh. “Scott and After: The Final Phase.” The Musical Times Vol. 113, No. 1556
(Oct., 1972): 959-962.

Vaughan Williams Symphonies. BBC Music Guides. Seattle: University of

Washington Press. 1973.

Pakenham, Simona. Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Discovery of his Music. London: Macmillan &
Co. Limited. 1957.

Palmer, Roy, ed. Folk Songs Collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams. London: J.M. Dent & Sons
Ltd. 1983.

Patterson, Annabel. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press. 1987.

Pike, Lionel. Vaughan Williams and the Symphony. Symphonic Studies No. 2. London: Toccata
Press. 2003.

Pirie, Peter J. “Choral.” The Musical Times Vol. 124, No. 1685 (July, 1983): 433-434.

Poggioli, Renato. The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1975.

Potts, Abbie Findlay. The Elegiac Mode: Poetic Form in Wordsworth and Other Elegists. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press. 1967.

Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago &
London: University of Chicago Press. 1994.

Roper, Alan. Arnold’s Poetic Landscapes. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. 1969.

Rosenberg, John D. Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature. London:
Anthem Press. 2005.

252
Savage, Roger. “Vaughan Williams, The Romany Ryes, and the Cambridge Ritualists.” Music &
Letters Vol. 83, No. 3 (August, 2002): 383-418.

Saylor, Eric. “Dramatic Applications of Folksong in Vaughan Williams’s Operas Hugh the
Drover and Sir John in Love.” Journal of the Royal Music Association Vol. 134, No. 1
(May 2009): 37-83.

“‘It’s Not Lambkins Frisking At All’: English Pastoral Music and the Great
War.”
The Musical Quarterly Vol. 91, Nos. 1-2 (2008): 39-59.

“The Significance of Nation in the Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams.” Ph.D.

diss.,
University of Michigan. 2003.

Sharp, Cecil J. English Folk Song: Some Conclusions. Fourth Edition prepared by Maud
Karpeles. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc. 1965.

Shove, Fregedond. Dreams and Journeys. Oxford: B.H. Blackwell. 1918.

Trilling, Lionel. Matthew Arnold. New York: Columbia University Press. London: George Allen
and Unwin Ltd. 1949.

Ulmer, William. “The Human Seasons: Arnold, Keats, and the Scholar-Gypsy.” Victorian Poetry
Vol. 22, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984): 247-261.

Vaughan Williams, Ralph. National Music and Other Essays. Second Edition. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press. 1987.

Vaughan Williams, Ursula. R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press. 1964 (Reprinted 1988.)

Wiener, Martin J. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. Second
Edition. Cambridge University Press. 2004.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press. 1973.

253
Original Manuscripts Consulted

British Library (London) Add. MS 50419

British Library Add. MS 57228
British Library Add. MS 57282
British Library Add. MS 57283
British Library Add. MS 63859
British Library Add. MS 71123
British Library Ms.Mus. 1584
John Rylands Library (Manchester), The Michael Kennedy Collection: KEN/3/1/7/29
John Rylands Library, The Michael Kennedy Collection: KEN/3/1/7/96
John Rylands Library, The Michael Kennedy Collection: KEN/3/1/54, No. 2

Scores Used for Musical Examples

Vaughan Williams, Ralph. An Oxford Elegy for Speaker, Small Chorus, and Small Orchestra.
Words Adapted from ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’ of Matthew Arnold. Piano-Vocal
Score. London: Oxford University Press. 1952.

———————————— Concerto for Oboe and Strings. London: Oxford University Press.
1967.

———————————— The House of Life: A Cycle of Six Sonnets. Words by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti. London: Edwin Ashdown. 19??.

———————————— Linden Lea. Words by W. Barnes. Boosey and Hawkes. 1912.

———————————— A Pastoral Symphony. Boosey and Hawkes. Hawkes Pocket Score

Series No. 73. 1952.

———————————— The Pilgrim’s Progress – A Morality In a Prologue, Four Acts and an

Epilogue Founded on Bunyan’s Allegory of the Same Name. Piano-Vocal Score. German
Adaptation by R. Müller-Hartmann. London: Oxford University Press. 1952.

———————————— Seven Songs for Voice and Piano. Boca Raton, Florida: Master Music
Publications, Inc. Master Vocal Series. 1988.

———————————— The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains: A Pastoral Episode

Founded upon Bunyan’s ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’. Oxford University Press. 1925.

———————————— Sinfonia Antartica. Full Score. London: Oxford University Press.

1953. Corrected 1968.

———————————— Toward the Unknown Region. Words by Walt Whitman. Song for

254
 Chorus and Orchestra. Vocal score. London: Breitkopf & Härtel. 1907.

———————————— Vaughan Williams: Collected Songs in Three Volumes, Vols. I and II.
Oxford University Press. 1993.

———————————— Willow-Wood. Cantata for Baritone Solo, Soprano and Alto Chorus
(ad lib.), and Orchestra. Piano-Vocal Score. London: Stainer Bell Ltd. 2005.

255