It is usual to attribute Ives' heart attack of 1918 to the double life he lived. Since 1906 (when he had suffered another collapse of his health), he had worked by day to build his own independent insurance agency into one of the richest in the nation (making himself a multi-millionaire) and spent his nights writing large quantities of revolutionary music. Overwork may have had much to do with the composer's health problems, but there was also a hereditary predisposition in his father's family toward cardiac and circulatory problems, and, as doctors found out, Ives suffered from diabetes. He may have felt that he would die young, and hoped to put his musical ideas down in a form in which they would be available to ordinary performers. As it happened, insulin treatment for diabetics was developed in 1921, allowing Ives to live for a third of a century longer. But his composing career was essentially over.

Most of the works in the volume 114 Songs are earlier compositions, or at least recast versions of orchestral or chamber works. "Grantchester" is one of the relatively new songs that Ives wrote specifically for the volume. The text is an excerpt from a work by the British poet Rupert Brooke. It expresses a wish to be in Grantchester for the purpose of getting back in touch with nature, a sentiment Ives himself expressed often in his writings and in other musical compositions.

The opening chords are hard-edged, wide-spread, and dissonant, but quickly retreat to a softer texture. In the left hand a string of parallel thirds hints at the song's ending. The first part of this complex song is in long, unmeasured stretches, with only rare barlines.

Ives breaks into a sing-song triplet rhythm when the text attacks "clever modern men," and, when the text alludes to the possibility of spotting a faun or satyr in the green, he quotes Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. Even when the quotation ends, lush, flowery echoes of Debussy's texture persist.

A hushed, widely spaced chord with six different notes changes the texture as the poet rejects this cleverness in favor of meditation in nature. The chain of thirds recurs and turns entirely white-note. Then the melodic line becomes mysterious and chantlike; there is a rising line in the right hand and a descending line in the left, with an unchanging murmuring figure in between, creating a magical texture.

It is not an Ives song that is often performed; those seeking more radical, more transcendental, or simpler ones can find these elsewhere. But it offers an unusual and highly evocative feeling that places it among the happy discoveries of the 114 Songs.

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