To a skylark

IT was early in August, 1914. Britain had just declared war after German troops had surged into Belgium. A 42-year-old English composer on holiday in Kent was strolling on the clifftop near Margate when a musical phrase ran through his mind. Before the succession of notes could evaporate, he took out a pad and wrote them down. As he did so, a keen boy scout on coastal patrol pounced and performed a citizen’s arrest, believing he was drawing a plan of the terrain for the benefit of the nation’s new foe. Such was the inauspicious genesis—as later related by Ralph Vaughan Williams himself—of one of our most cherished musical passages, inspired by a George Meredith poem of 1881 and the composer’s need to express a deep concern, shared by others, over England’s rural decline (‘Up with the lark’, November 4, 2020).

‘Poignant words from battlefields confirmed the soaring skylark as a symbol of escape’

However, would not be his brief poem that told of poppies and graves above which ‘the larks, still bravely singing, fly scarce heard amid the guns below’.