Painted in 1968, Lake, "O Hurry Where by Water Among Trees" takes its evocative title from the opening line of W. B. Yeats’s poem The Ragged Wood, first published in In the Seven Woods in 1904. Yeats conjures an enchanted landscape in which water, woodland and reflected images become inseparable - imagery that finds a remarkable visual counterpart in Hitchens’ own lifelong exploration of the Sussex landscape. Hitchens returned to the same poem as inspiration into the 1970s. His repeated invocation of Yeats suggests a particular affinity with a poem whose imagery of woodland, water and reflection so closely echoes the subjects that preoccupied Hitchens at Greenleaves, his secluded home near Petworth. Woodland pools, rivers and millponds offered an endlessly changing interplay of surface and reflection.

The painting's panoramic format is fundamental to this effect. Hitchens had long favoured an extended horizontal canvas as a means of resisting the single, static viewpoint of traditional landscape painting. Here, it allows the composition to unfold almost musically: passages of colour answer one another across the surface, while the sweep of the brush carries the eye from one end of the painting to the other. Water becomes less a discrete subject than a means of destabilising space itself — allowing earth, vegetation, sky and reflection to coexist within a single field of colour.