PoetryConnection.net Discussion

[AndyH]

This poem I posted up because it describes the area where I live, in particular the well-known village of Grantchester, where many great novelists, philosophers and poets (including Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolfe, Rupert Brooke) met at its orchard coffeehouse (still open, I go there sometimes) overlooking the meadows towards Cambridge, and Grantchester's church which still, indeed, does stand at 10 to 3. And...it mentions my own village, Coton! (of which you may remember me make mention in some of my poems, such as 'Sunset fields outside Coton'). The poem's concluding lines are famous and represent a lot about the English spirit. I've highlighted where Coton is mentioned and the concluding lines.


The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow . . .
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
— Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . .
'Du lieber Gott!'

Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; — and THERE the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten's not verboten.

ειθε γενοιμην . . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.

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 Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There's peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I'm told) . . .

Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
---------------------- --Rupert Brooke

[lmarshal]

AndyH: Thanks for posting the Rupert Brooke poem. I just received in the mail a few days ago a little book called "World War One British Poets," and, of course, Brooke's poetry is well represented there.

I've always liked (being the Anglophile that I am!) Brooke's famous lines:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

lkm

[AndyH]

Yes, I remember reading those lines...such patriotic lines, that English nostalgia tied to its humble soil...I'm not an expert on Brooke, but I think he fought at Gallipoli, or at least somewhere on the eastern front, and died of some disease whilst fighting. Having come across this poem (and rekindling my memory of reading your Brooke poem), I have been inspired to begin an interest in Brooke's poetry and life.

[lmarshal]

AndyH: A quote from the book I mentioned:

"...he was 28 when he died of blood poisoning shortly before the
Gallipoli expedition."

"Brooke enlisted shortly after England declared war against Germany on August 4, 1914, and turned his poetic efforts to his experiences as a soldier."

lkm

[AndyH]

So he didn't even fight...it seems such an anticlimax for such a promising life.

I researched a bit on him on the net.

The story of his friends burying him I found quite inspiring:

[lmarshal]

AndyH: Thanks for the post about Brooke's burial. I had the notion that he had seen combat, but if he enlisted in August of 1914 and died in April of 1915, perhaps he didn't. My knowledge of World War I is just about zilch. I think I will also do a little research on Brooke and on Gallipoli. Is that the battle in which New Zealanders (maybe Aussies too??) and British soldiers were terribly outnumbered and had horrible casualties? I wish I knew more history. Time to research! lkm

[lmarshal]

AndyH: I'm reading Gallipoli to the Somme (the WW I memoir of A. C. Aitken of New Zealand). Wonderful. He occasionally mentions one of the British WW I poets. The book certainly gives me a new picture of the war...worse than I thought, so often pointless, and such an enormous waste of life. And yet...the bravery of so many is humbling to read of. lkm
_________________
From "O, Thou Opening, O"

Stand by a slow stream:
Hear the sigh of what is.
Be a pleased rock
On a plain day.

--Theodore Roethke

[Tinker1111]