The Lark Ascending is subtitled Romance for Violin and Orchestra, and is one of Vaughan-Williams' most popular works. It was written in 1914, the year of the outbreak of World War 1, but was not performed until after the war, in 1920. The score is prefaced by a quotation from a poem by George Meredith, a Victorian author and poet who was both long-lived and prolific, though now largely forgotten:

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.

For singing till his heaven fills,
Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes

Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

This piece is hauntingly prophetic. Written on the eve of a war which was to wipe out a whole generation in the mud and blood of the trenches, the lark sings in a landscape already devoid of people. Beginning and ending with the lark alone in a completely empty sky, even the folk melody of the central section seems a little unreal, as if the people exist only in our imagination. There is certainly much beauty here but, as so often in Vaughan Williams' best music, there is also something deeper.