All his life, Vaughan Williams wanted to create an opera from Arnold's Scholar Gipsy.

The chorus generally sings wordlessly, only occasionally declaiming portions of the text to echo the speaker.

Vaughan Williams did not usually write music of melancholy nostalgia, but the subject matter makes such an approach necessary.

The work as a whole is a loving and ruminative evocation of Arnold's time and place.

[2] Peter Pirie has postulated that this work is Vaughan Williams' homage to his friend and fellow-composer Gustav Holst, and noted its aesthetic affinity with Flos Campi.