In the bare bones of Vaughan Williams’ mature musical language therefore we see these features, which were undoubtedly derived and developed from this love of folk song. It was this which finally allowed him to find a voice and was to define the character of his music, allowing him to break free from the great German romantic tradition. After a further period of study, this time in Paris with Ravel, Vaughan Williams was ready to compose. On his returning home from Paris, Vaughan Williams’ lifelong friend Gustav Holst is said to have remarked, “Why Ralph, your music sounds like it has been having tea with Debussy!” . A great nationalistic composer, Vaughan Williams revelled in the delights of both the English countryside and London. One has only to look at the titles of some of his most enduring works (The Lark Ascending, Fantasia on Greensleeves, a Norfolk Rhapsody, In the Fen Country, The London Symphony, The Sea Symphony, Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis) to understand that this was a different type of nationalism from that which we find in the Pomp and Circumstance marches of Elgar, and one much more akin to that of Frederick Delius.

An Oxford Elegy was written between 1947 and 1949. The words are taken from two poems by the British poet Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888). The first, The Scholar Gipsy (1853) tells the story of an impoverished Oxford student who left his studies to join a band of gipsies, and so ingratiated himself with them that they told him many of the secrets of their trade. The poem is based on a story by the English philosopher and cleric Joseph Glanville (1636 – 1680). Arnold extends the story, however, with pastoral descriptions of Oxfordshire, and accounts of sightings of the Scholar Gipsy around the countryside in the intervening two centuries since the story was written. Arnold imagines him as a mysterious, shadowy figure and even claims to have seen him for himself. The second poem, Thyrsis (1865), is a homage to Arnold’s great friend, the poet Arnold Hugh Clough, who died in 1861. (The character, Thyrsis, a shepherd in the Seventh Eclogue of Virgil, lost a singing match against Corydon.) In a letter to his brother, Arnold refers to time spent with Clough, particularly that spent walking in the countryside, stating that The Scholar Gipsy was "meant to fix the remembrance of those delightful wanderings of ours in the Cumnor hillsbefore they were quite effaced." Arnold revisits these scenes in the poem, and fuses the images with those from the Scholar Gipsy. Thyrsis is certainly a companion-piece to the Scholar Gipsy, and, some might say, a sequel.

The first performance of An Oxford Elegy was a private one which took place at Vaughan Williams’ house in London in 1949. The first public performance was given at Queen’s College Oxford in 1952.  Written for narrator, chorus, and orchestra, An Oxford Elegy is unmistakably the product of the composer's most mature musical thought. The chorus is often deployed wordlessly – a technique which Vaughan Williams had used to great effect in Sinfonia Antarctica (music based on his 1947 film score for Scott of the Antarctic) and which was also used later by Holst in his Planets Suite. Vaughan Williams had long considered Arnold's Scholar Gipsy a good subject for an opera and in 1901 had even made some sketches towards such a stage work. One of the themes from these early jottings is actually employed in this work. Vaughan Williams assembled the text himself.  Analysis shows that, in doing so, he has rather butchered the two poems, extracting a total of twenty-nine separate portions from them, often missing words, adding words and frequently stopping or starting in the middle of stanzas. There are fourteen extracts of varying lengths (mostly from the beginning) from the Scholar Gipsy, followed by fifteen extracts from Thyrsis

The short instrumental introduction presents themes of melancholy and nostalgia, using divided strings and keening wordless chorus to great effect. Arnold’s abridged tale of The Scholar Gipsy is then told, along with his reminiscences from Thyrsis of Clough and himself wandering the same countryside, to an accompaniment which is highly pastoral in style, and evocative of beauty, of regret and of times past. The music is constantly coloured with subtle dissonance, whilst wistful melodies underscore the tale, illustrating the descriptions of the mysterious, ghostly, quality of the poor scholar, visions of whom have haunted the locality for two centuries. The famous lines describing Oxford’s dreaming spires are set to a ravishing warm phrase evoking summer light and warmth in such an impressionistic way that the paintings of Monet and Renoir are brought to mind. Vaughan Williams sets the narrator's own sighting of the wanderer (“Have I not pass’d thee on the wooden bridge? Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow”) to two eerie, alternating minor triads set for divided sopranos and altos.