[1][2] His literary tastes were wide-ranging, and among the English poets of the 19th and early 20th centuries whom he admired were Tennyson, Swinburne, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hardy, Housman, and George Meredith.

[4] The composer's second wife, Ursula, herself a poet, wrote that in The Lark Ascending Vaughan Williams had "taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thought … and had made the violin become both the bird's song and its flight, being, rather than illustrating the poem from which the title was taken".

[5] At the head of the score, Vaughan Williams wrote out twelve lines from Meredith's 122-line poem: He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound, Of many links without a break, In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

[9] The soloist for whom the work was written and to whom it is dedicated was Marie Hall, a leading British violinist of the time, a former pupil of Edward Elgar, and celebrated for her interpretation of that composer's Violin Concerto.

The music critic of The Times[n 4] noted that The Lark Ascending was not the main item on the programme, which featured an early performance of Holst's The Planets, but it made a favourable impression.

[n 5] It begins with a two-bar introduction by woodwind and muted strings in 68 time, after which the soloist enters with an unaccompanied cadenza marked pianissimo and sur la touche (that is, placing the bow over the fingerboard, which reduces the higher harmonics and gives an ethereal tone).

[20] Towards the end of the cadenza Vaughan Williams introduces a melody with which the solo violin continues when the orchestra re-enters, in 24:[21] A second, unaccompanied cadenza, shorter than the first, leads to a contrasting episode (Allegretto tranquillo quasi andante) with a new melody for flutes:[22] A section marked Allegro tranquillo[n 6] begins with solo violin trills, punctuated by off-beat triangle (the only percussion in the piece).

[12] Christopher Mark similarly sees a distinction between the airborne solo part and the orchestral sections, finding the "folk-like melody" for the flute "shifting the focus from the sky to ground-level and human activity".

[32] The musicologist Lewis Foreman comments, "It is possible to forget what a revolutionary piece this was in the context of the British music of 1914 [with] its rhythmic freedom and flow and its avoidance of tonic-and-dominant cadencing, together with its imagery".

[33] Jeffrey Davis writes, "At one level it seems to be an idyll of rural England [but] in view of its composition on the eve of the First World War, there is perhaps an underlying layer of sadness to the music.

He adds, "Rather than scorning English pastoralism – as Elisabeth Lutyens and others did with observations such as 'the cowpat school' – we should value this rare quality expressed so perfectly by Vaughan Williams in particular."

[19] Howes adds, "'Romance' for Vaughan Williams is devoid of erotic connotation … The lark may be calling to his mate but it sounds more like joie de vivre on a spring morning with a slight haze in the air.