This is a brisk and ironic individual song by one of the greatest composers of English art song.

Benjamin Britten found time in 1953 (during which year he finished and staged one opera, Gloriana and plunged into heavy work on his greatest opera The Turn of the Screw [finished in 1954]) to set ten poems by Thomas Hardy for tenor voice and piano.

In common with The Turn of the Screw, the resulting song cycle, Winter Words, includes several songs reflecting Britten's lifelong preoccupation with the theme of corruption of innocence.

In crafting the shape of his song cycles Britten was uncommonly conscious of the dramatic impression created by the succession of songs—the story, or the succession of ideas. The finished cycle began in imagery of bleak November that holds no hope of improvement, even for playing children. It ended in a cry for release from the knowledge of care and struggle that life inevitably stamps on the innocent babe.

Yet, along there way there are moments of ironic triumph of innocence: A little penniless boy rises above his sad state by playing a violin for a convict he encounters with a constable at a railway station; a band of saints and choir of angels serenade at the gravestone of a faithful church choirmaster whose Vicar lazily ignored a last request to have a hymn played at his burial.

So there was no room in the cycle for this song, which also celebrates a triumph of innocence in imagery intriguingly reminiscent of Shelley's Ozymandias.

In this song's three sections, first a haughty nobleman of Athelhall, annoyed at the "wretched children romping in my park" orders them thrown out and set to work. The music is childlike, with some of the harshness of the sounds of children at play.

In the second section, the proud lord orders his sculptors to carve in a sheet of stone his likeness: Seven feet tall, bearing "shield, and crest, and casque, and sword" and have it set in the Church to "perpetuate my mightiness." The music becomes grand and self important.

In the third, 300 years later the church-restorers can find no surviving members of the noble lineage, so they use the stone as a piece of flowing in the school, under the seats. The children's incessant scuffing has knocked off his nose and erased his name. When they think of "Sir Nameless" at all, it is only to briefly wonder, "Who was this old stone man beneath our toes?"

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