Dame Elizabeth Maconchy, more attracted by the European modernism of Bartók and Janáček than English pastoralism, composed in a great variety of forms, including song, favouring such poets as Byron, Day Lewis, Donne, Hopkins, MacNeice, Shelley, Shakespeare and Traherne. Sun, Moon and Stars (Maconchy’s title), the first song of a cycle of four, known by the same name, sets a poem from Traherne’s Centuries III, 2—a series of meditations in which the poet, recognizing that he is God’s child, exults in all aspects of God’s creation on earth. The conscious delight in all these divine manifestations expresses the mutual love felt between him and God. This rapturous joy—unparalleled in any other writer of the seventeenth century, except perhaps Barthold Hinrich Brockes in his Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (see Handel’s Neun Deutsche Lieder)—is expressed in a poetic prose, reminiscent of the heightened diction of the Psalms, that breathes a wonderful sense of peace and rapture, quite unclouded by any notion of original sin. The reader is encouraged to view God’s creation with the wonder and simplicity of a child.

from notes by Richard Stokes © 2016