The curlew's cry is the symbol of unrequited love in Peter Warlock's dolorous masterpiece, which sets poems by W.B. Yeats. Warlock makes excellent use of his unusual accompanying ensemble of flute, English horn, and strings (either as a quartet or orchestra). At the very beginning, the English horn utters the curlew's song in rising sevenths. This is taken up and embellished by the viola(s). The long, haunting instrumental introduction continues with violin arabesques; a desolate, repeated-note flute solo said to imitate the call of the peewit; a return of the English horn; and finally, a cello passage that leads into the late arrival of the tenor with "O curlew, cry no more in the air...because your crying brings to my mind the passion-dimm'd eyes and long heavy hair that was shaken out over my breast. There is enough evil in the crying of wind." This is "He reproves the curlew" from Yeats' The Wind Among the Reeds (the source of most of the texts here) and is initially sung to the English horn theme, which recurs throughout the song cycle and ends the first song. An extended, hushed instrumental interlude leads to the brief second song, "The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love," where the tenor recalls his dream—only a dream—that "the old despair would end in love," to the accompaniment of muted strings. "The Withering of the Boughs," from In the Seven Woods, is the longest song in the set and each of its three verses is echoed—and, in the first section, foreshadowed—instrumentally. The first is unsettled but still quite slow, culminating in the words "The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams." (Each verse ends this way, the last with the words spoken, not sung, in a near whisper.) The second verse briefly rides with the witches and "their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool and their secret smile," but the tenor maintains that they are not the ones who have not withered the boughs; the withering is, again, the fault of his dreams. The third section is a serene depiction of "the sleepy country where swans fly round coupled with golden chains and sing as they fly," until the English horn and pizzicato strings return the tenor to his self-obsessed reality. A long, Moderato instrumental section with distant-seeming solos by violin and flute drifts through half-formed recitative phrases and general despondency, fading away to allow the tenor to sing his last song, "He Hears the Cry of the Sedge." This lacks accompaniment until the very end. The singer finally acknowledges that "your breast will not lie by the breast of your beloved in sleep," and the lower strings provide the final, accepting cadence.

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