The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
"The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" is a light poem by the English Georgian poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), written while in Berlin in 1912. After initially titling the poem "Home" and then "The Sentimental Exile", the author eventually chose the name of his occasional residence near Cambridge: the titular Old Vicarage in the village of Grantchester. (The house now has a statue of the poet in pride of place.) The poem's references can be overly obscure because of the many specific Cambridgeshire locations and English traditions to which the poem refers. Some have seen it as sentimentally nostalgic, which it is, while others have recognised its satiric and sometimes cruel humour.
Using octosyllabics—a metre often favoured by Brooke—the author writes of Grantchester and other nearby villages. It is very much a poem of "place": the place where Brooke composed the work, Berlin and the Café des Westens, and the contrast of that German world ("Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot") with his home in England. Yet it is more than just the longing of an exile for his home, nostalgically imagined. The landscape of Cambridgeshire is reproduced in the poem, but Brooke, the academic, populates this English world with allusions and references from history and myth. He compares the countryside to a kind of Greek Arcadia, home to nymphs and fauns, and refers to such famous literary figures as Lord Byron, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Tennyson. Homesick for England, a land "Where men with Splendid Hearts may go", it is Grantchester, in particular, that he desires. The poem ends with the specificity of place, referring to the Church of St Andrew and St Mary and the tea garden known as The Orchard
Stands the church clock at ten-to-three? And is there honey still for tea?
Culture and legacy[edit]
Charles Ives set a portion of the poem to music in 1921; the piece is 15 bars long.[1]
The final two lines of the poem are paraphrased by Doremus Jessop in Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here.[2]
In the 1941 movie "Pimpernel" Smith, Leslie Howard's titular character recites a piece of this poem ("God! I will pack, and take a train, And get me to England once again! For England's the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go") and refers to Brooke in the scene.
The 1949 comedy sketch Balham, Gateway to the South, written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, ends with a verse by "C. Quills Smith, Balham's own bard". In a few stanzas the "bard" manages to plagiarise or mangle the work of several real poets, and ends with the last two lines of Brooke's poem.
Iain Moncrieffe bookends a significant essay, the epilogue to W. Stanley Moss's Ill Met by Moonlight[3], with quotations from Brooke. He begins with words from "Menelaus and Helen", and concludes by quoting a quotation: extracts from a wartime letter written to him by Patrick Leigh Fermor, who ends his missive with the words έίθε γενοίμην (formally "would I were", or in more modern idiom, "I wish I was"). Fermor, writing from a Greek valley, where he was engaged in guerrilla operations against the Nazi occupation, wishes that he and his friend could be together, at one or other of their firesides, enjoying one another's company, rather than relying on erratic correspondence during a time of hostilities. One might conclude that quoting from Brooke was a vogue pastime for the band of well-educated young officers based in Egypt, whose best-known exploit was the capture of a German general in Crete in the spring of 1944, and successfully taking him off the island to Alexandria (the subject of Moss's book).
John Betjeman reuses εἴθε γενοίμην ("eithe genoimen") in his poem "The Olympic Girl":[4]
Eithe genoimen ... would I were,
(Forgive me shade of Rupert Brooke)
An object fit to claim her look,
Oh! Would I were a racket press'd,
With hard excitement to her breast!
(First published in A Few Late Chrysanthemums, 1954)
Iris Murdoch's novel An Unofficial Rose, published in 1962, takes its title from a line of this poem.
A 1975 episode of the Croft and Perry BBC sitcom Dad's Army is titled Is There Honey Still for Tea?
References[edit]
- ^ Ives, Charles (1922). "Grantchester". 114 Songs (1st ed.). Reading, Conn: Self-published. pp. 37–9.
- ^ Lewis, Sinclair (2017). It Can't Happen Here. Great Britain: Penguin Classics. p. 36. ISBN 978-0-241-31066-3.
- ^ Harrap 1950, reissued by Cassell/Orion, London, 1999
- ^ John Betjeman (1954). A Few Late Chrysanthemums.
External links[edit]
- Memoir by Edward Marsh (Brooke's literary executor) including Brooke's letter to Geoffrey Fry, 1911, describing his feelings about being parted from England and Cambridge.
- Full text in The Complete Poems of Rupert Brooke (Sidwick & Jackson, Ltd, London, 1934), p. 93.