Confecting an anthology of English poems ranging from fifteenth-century anonymous sources to Ben Johnson, Blake, Keats, and Tennyson, Britten fashioned a unity in the Serenade largely through a pervasive reference to nocturnal motifs, which he framed with a pair of horn solos. The exuberant writing for both horn and voice in Tennyson's "Nocturne" is counterbalanced by the haunting ground of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge," a text Stravinsky was to appropriate in his Cantata of 1952.

While the work reflects the extent to which nineteenth-century musical values persisted in many quarters through the period of World War 11, it also discloses the discovery of a highly personal voice attuned to the nuances of the English language; a refined harmonic sense aware of the potential of the modes; and an ear sensitive to the shadings of pitch (as the untempered pitches of the natural horn in the Prelude and Postlude, or the quarter-tone bending of the horn at the close of Blake's "Elegy."). The work was written in 1942 and the virtuoso parts were intended for the tenor Peter Pears and the hornist Dennis Brain shortly after the composer and the singer returned to England following an abortive attempt to emigrate to America during World War II. The note of melancholy that infuses the whole speaks of the crisis of conscience that the composer suffered during this period. Much of the musical imagery, including the flying bugles of the "Nocturne," were to reappear many years later in the composer's War Requiem of 1961 - a work in which Britten attempted to resolve his feelings about war and his role as a conscientious objector.