The death of Clough is told in the metaphor of the cuckoo which migrates “with parting cry” before the height of the summer season. This is set to a quick rising motif, the musical representation of the image of a bird taking off, and agitated, off-beat chorus exclamations. This in turn leads into the “high Midsummer pomps", a catalogue of summer-blooming flowers sung by the upper voices to a phrase which constantly rises and falls, set against a gentle pastoral march with softly pulsating rhythms and a harmonic ostinato rocking back and forth between two chords for the orchestra. This section climaxes in the shimmeringly scored bars which accompany the depiction of "the full moon and the white evening star". The author’s acknowledgement of Clough’s death, and of his own impending death ("Yes, thou art gone, and round me too the night, in ever-nearing circles weaves her shade, I see her veil draw soft across the day”), is dark, minor-keyed, heavy and lugubrious. The work ends with a plea to “roam on…our scholar travels yet the loved hillside.”
The music is warm, resigned, comfortable as if a certain peace has finally been found. Vaughan Williams' folk-influenced melodies are given harmonically compelling settings throughout, with flattened sevenths and minor thirds imparting a modal feel which is never far away, and subtle polytonality and highly controlled and sensitively managed dissonance creating a cold, glittering atmosphere in others. The work as a whole is a ruminative, moving and highly pastoral evocation of Arnold's time and place.
Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill; But when the fields are still, Here will I sit and wait, Here will I sit and wait, Screened is this nook o’er the high, half-reaped field, That sweet city with her dreaming spires; |
Come, let me read the oft-read tale again; But rumours hung about the country-side, Leaning backwards in a pensive dream, And once, in winter, on the causeway chill
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