In his setting of Rossetti's Silent Noon, Vaughan Williams uses the music to echo and subtlely play with the structure of the sonnet.
The piece opens with a simple, gently rhythmical piano motif on piano, which continues when the tenor takes up the same melody.
The third line sees the composer take full account of Rossetti's enjambement, with the first four words sung to long, single notes that give a sense of conclusion before the remainder of the line is carried, via a rising melody, into the next, which itself ends with a strong, high note. The rising nature of the melody and the increase in volume from voice and piano matches the "billowing skies".
After a piano interlude, the voice begins a new theme. Again, the piano underpins this. This section concludes quietly, reflecting the poet's "visible silence".
On the ninth and 10th lines, the composer recognises Rossetti's turn by allowing the voice to be unaccompanied for much of the very simple melodic line, with the change to a minor key on "blue" reflecting the delicacy of the poet's image.
However, instead of musically starting the final quatrain on the 11th line, Vaughan Williams sets that as a stand-alone, again with the singer largely unaccompanied.
He returns to the major key for the recapitulation of the opening theme. Here, Vaughan Williams effectively turns the last three lines of the sonnet into a concluding quatrain by adding a fourth 15th line, giving the tenor a long, high note for 'song' and then repeating this and ending with the piano alone once more, with the theme falling rather than rising, mirroring the opening motif.
The texture is simple throughout, with the timbre of piano and voice matching each other and echoing Rossetti's theme of lovers spending time quietly together.