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;
Go, Shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes;
No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,
Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
Nor the cropped 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.

Screened is this nook o’er the high, half-reaped 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 a 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.

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 climbed the hill
And gained the white brow of the Cumnor range;
Turn’d once to watch, while thick the snow-flakes fell,
The line of festal light in Christ Church hall –
Then sought thy straw in some sequester’d grange.