We'll to the Woods No More is a song cycle for voice and piano composed in 1928 by John Ireland. It consists of settings of two poems by A. E. Housman (1859–1936) and a concluding piece for solo piano named after a third.[1]
A performance takes about 8 minutes. The poems are:[2]
"We'll to the Woods No More" (Last Poems (1922), unnumbered preface)
"In Boyhood" ("When I would muse in boyhood"; Last Poems, No. XXXII)
"Spring Will Not Wait" ("'Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town"; A Shropshire Lad (1896), No. XXXIX)
John France has written, "The mood of this cycle is typically a deep sense of the fragility of life, love and friendship that so influenced both men."[3] Rob Barnett has written of the piano piece "Spring Will Not Wait" that, "It is in Ireland’s typically elusive, wanderingly ambivalent tonal palette."[4]