“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. . .”

Ben:

It’s rare that I go to Grantchester but the times I have been I can feel my breathing slow, and my eyes adjust. It is said that there is an underground passage which runs from the meadows to King’s College; it is said that a fiddler disappeared down this passage and was never seen again; it is said that Byron swam in the pools by the meadows; none of this crosses my mind when I find myself in Grantchester. Usually, I notice that, rather than the voices of tour guides in punts, I can hear the babble of the river’s water running, slowly. I notice that, rather than the staggering over cobbles, I can feel the softness of the ground underfoot. I notice the quiet and the calm. Orwell hated the poem. He called it “something worse than worthless but as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that period felt it is a valuable document.” I happen to think it’s quite good. Not only is it a startlingly lucid poem of place, but it is also a welcome sigh of relief at leaving Cambridge.

Madelaine:

It's a critical convention, at least for sceptics, to say that the pastoral privileges a wilful unconsciousness, a turning-away. In this formulation the idyll means escape. Brooke’s poem was written in Berlin, just a few years before the outbreak of the First World War, and it’s full of these eye-rolling inheritances – even reaching an almost literal unconsciousness with the speaker’s projected doze amongst the “sleepy” greenery. But ‘Grantchester’ is also clear about its current separation from these open fields. There’s an uneasiness to the poem, gurgling just under the surface, which makes its vision shifty. The River Cam smells “thrilling-sweet and rotten / Unforgettable, unforgotten.” The speaker “hear[s] the breeze / sobbing in the little trees.” Brooke has a way with complicated tides; as the poem swells it often recedes. My favourite part is in the second stanza, where nighttime “wakes a vague unpunctual star, / A slippered Hesper.” I think it must be something in that strange word “slippered” which I'm drawn to – perhaps the consonance there, frictionless. Brooke probably means that the star has been smacked a bit for its tardiness; I like to think, though, that he intends the adjective “slippery,” but as it twinkles it slips from both view and grammatical case. In Berlin, that kind of freedom seems unavailable, so Brooke finds it in verse. I’m looking forward to my next walk down to the meadows in Easter, when the weather's better.

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