The Rhapsody, an orchestral epilogue to the composer's song cycle of the same name, is in the form of an elegy. Butterworth was the first of several English composers to set poems from A.E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad," and chose those that mourn the lives and deaths of "redcoats" (British soldiers). Though the poems were written well before 1914, the music is now inseparable from the bleak years of the World War I, when it was written. The main theme is a meditation on one of Butterworth's most haunting songs, "The Cherry Tree." Though scored for a large orchestra, it is mostly somber, quiet music, with a climax toward the end as the trumpets poignantly echo the song tune, after which the somber mood returns. The Rhapsody ends with funereal drumbeats that sound eerily prophetic: Butterworth was killed in the last year of the war, at age 31.

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