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The Old Vicarage, Grantchester is a (mainly) 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. One of Brooke’s most famous poems, its references can be overly obscure because of the many specific Cambridge locations and English traditions to which the poem refers. Some have seen it as sentimentally nostalgic, which it is, while others have recognized its satiric and sometimes cruel humor.
Contents
Using octosyllabics—a meter often favored by Brooke—the author writes of Grantchester and other nearby villages in what has been called a seriocomic style. It is very much a poem of “place,” the place where Brooke composed the work, Berlin, 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.
Text
Source:The Complete Poems of Rupert Brooke (Sidwick & Jackson, Ltd, London, 1934), p.93. [1]
Culture and legacy
John Betjeman reuses εἴθε γενοίμην ('eithe genoimen) in his poem The Olympic Girl:
(John Betjeman, first published in A Few Late Chrysanthemums, 1954)
Sir Ian Moncrieffe concludes his epilogue to W Stanley Moss's Ill Met by Moonlight with extracts from a wartime letter written to him by Paddy Leigh Fermor from a Greek valley, where he was engaged in secret guerrilla operations against the German invaders. PLF ended his letter with the words έίθε γενοίμην. He wishes that he and IM 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. IM starts his epilogue with another quotation from Brooke's Menelaus and Helen, and 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).
An episode of the Croft and Perry situation comedy Dad's Army is titled Is There Honey Still for Tea?