This piece is a response to the poem by Edward Thomas of the same name. After I had made a number of unsuccessful attempts to set the poem, I eventually settled on the idea of writing a purely instrumental response to the text.
In the poem Thomas describes the memory of a distant and unfamiliar three-note birdcall, which grows to represent a combination of characteristically subtle and personal themes, least of all a sense of hindsight mixed with self-doubt, famously captured in Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken.
