I first came across Auden's poetry in the mid-1950s when I was an undergraduate and Organ Scholar at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Auden was represented in the Penguin Contemporary Verse and then I bought his Collected Shorter Poems, 1930–1944 from Heffers, the bookshop that used to be in the street called Petty Cury before the old shops and the coaching hotel, The Red Lion, were demolished. I was immediately captivated by the spontaneity of the language and its unforced use of rhyme and inherited stanza forms. I responded to the Hopkins-like assonances and alliterations of ‘Look, stranger’ and to other musical devices, such as the whimsical refrain ‘agreeably, agreeably, agreeably’ in ‘Carry her over the water’. I wrote my first cycle, Four W. H. Auden Songs, in September 1956. Appropriately enough for the seascape of ‘Look, stranger’, our house was only a few hundred yards from the estuary of the River Ribble in Lancashire. At this time Auden was very much in the news and the Sunday Times had printed an extract from his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford.

The third section of Collected Shorter Poems, 1930–1944 is called ‘Songs and Other Musical Pieces’. I must have regarded this as an open invitation, like Yeats's ‘Words for Music Perhaps’, since all eight poems I set came from there, apart from ‘Happy Ending’. I worked with the natural rhythm of the spoken text in relation to the metrical scheme, all qualified by the mood of the poem. The process was instinctive at the time when I first set Auden – a kind of love at first sight – but later on I felt that I wanted to know everything I could about a poet before composing a song cycle. I have even told composition students that it is bad manners to find just one poem in an anthology and then set that! I think the composer has a greater responsibility.