Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony for orchestra, chorus and solo voices, set to texts by Walt Whitman, is both a splendid homage to the English late Romantic choral tradition of Elgar and Parry, and a forerunner of Benjamin Britten’s Spring Symphony. While overtly descriptive of the sea in its many moods, the work nevertheless marks a radical departure from precedent. In his desire to free English music from the Austro-German framework, Vaughan Williams combines high art folk-inflected music. In his setting of verses by Walt Whitman, the composer invites an analogy between the voyager at sea and the journeying of the soul towards the unknown regions on earth, as the shop finally vanishes over the horizon. “O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God? O farther, farther, sail!”