St Peter’s, Petersham recorded these songs for Lent and Easter 2021. Vaughan Williams wrote the Five Mystical Songs between 1906 and 1911. The work sets four poems (the first, ‘Easter’, being divided into two parts) by seventeenth-century Welsh-born English poet and Anglican priest George Herbert (1593–1633), from his 1633 collection The Temple: Sacred Poems. As befits Herbert’s mystical poetry, the music is reflective and colourful, with quiet, personal meditations in between ecstatic songs of praise.