This is the second of six songs in the cycle, The House of Life, one of Vaughan Williams' finest vocal collections from his early years. The songs, scored for voice and piano, are based on the six sonnets of the same collective title by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Probably the most famous of the songs in the set is this one, "Silent Noon," whose text is an expression of the rapturous mood following love-making. Set in the country, it also details many lovely pastoral elements that surround the two lovers ("The pasture gleams and glooms/'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass").

The song opens in a serene and sunny mood, Vaughan Williams presenting a lovely, soaring melody of rich Romantic character. Here he achieves a passion and intensity of expression, without storming the heights or employing loud sonorities. The piano accompaniment consists of lilting, soothing chords in the outer sections and of delicate writing mostly in the upper register for the middle section, where the vocal line is, once again, lovely and richly Romantic. The transition back to the main theme is particularly touching, the voice yearning gently for a pregnant moment ("So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above") before the opening melody returns for a lovely close. In sum, this is one of the composer's earliest vocal masterpieces, whose ravishing beauty will appeal to most song fanciers.

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In the first few years of the twentieth century, Vaughan Williams set quite a lot of verse by Dante Gabriel Rossetti to music (he also set a few poems by Rossetti's younger sister, Christina). The most ambitious of these settings are the cantata for voice and piano Willow-Wood of 1903, and the song cycle The House of Life, which was first performed in London on December 2, 1904 by soprano Edith Clegg and pianist Hamilton Harty. Vaughan Williams's other song cycle of 1904, Songs of Travel, was premiered at this same concert.

Despite the interest of composers like Vaughan Williams and Claude Debussy, the poetry of Rossetti isn't the most conducive to musical settings. While the rhythms and, as one critic would have it, the "voluptuousness" of the poetry are more than interesting enough from a composer's standpoint, there is little imagery that might lend itself to musical imitation. This might explain the slightly self-conscious quality of The House of Life, especially as compared to the more robust settings of Robert Louis Stevenson in Songs of Travel.

The cycle opens with "Love-Sight"; in an easy triple meter, it builds to a big climax with "The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, / The wind of Death's imperishable wing." The song closes with a lovely piano postlude. "Silent Noon" calmly evokes the imagery of a lazy summer's day "when twofold silence was the song of love." Perhaps the most ambitious song of the set is "Love's Minstrels," with its rhythmic freedom, its passionate arpeggios accompanying the second verse, and the solo piano's prologue and epilogue. Both "Heart's Haven" and "Death in Love" are rather grandiose—perhaps too large of gesture for the intimacy of the poetry. Vaughan Williams fans can, however, hear certain anticipations, particularly in the latter song, of A Sea Symphony, on which he was starting work at about this time. The cycle ends on a restrained note with "Love's Last Gift." While the song is on the conventional side, there is a nice evocation of the "warm sea," and some interesting and unusual harmonies for "those worse things the wind is moaning of."

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