The Old Vicarage, Grantchester by Rupert Brooke
"The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" is a notable poem by Rupert Brooke, composed in 1912 while he was in Berlin. Initially titled "Home" and later "The Sentimental Exile," the poem reflects Brooke’s longing for his occasional residence in Grantchester, near Cambridge. It employs an octosyllabic meter and blends elements of nostalgia with humor, creating a unique seriocomic style. The poem paints a vivid picture of the Cambridgeshire landscape, drawing on allusions to classical mythology and famous literary figures, while simultaneously contrasting the idyllic Grantchester with its neighboring villages.
Brooke offers a satirical commentary on the inhabitants of these nearby towns, depicting them with a critical yet playful lens. Despite its comedic undertones, the poem also delves into themes of beauty, certainty, and the fleeting nature of life, culminating in a poignant reflection on loss and longing. Written just before World War I, it anticipates the profound changes that would soon affect the world, enhancing its resonance as a meditation on place and memory. Overall, "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" serves as both a personal expression of homesickness and a broader commentary on the transient nature of existence.
The Old Vicarage, Grantchester by Rupert Brooke
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1916 (collected in Collected Poems, 1916)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” was written by Brooke 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.
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.
If the poem is nostalgic and sentimental, however, it is also satiric in its treatment of the Cambridgeshire landscape. In wishing to be in Grantchester, Brooke compares its virtues with those of other nearby towns and villages. In a series of wry couplets, Brooke pokes sly fun at the inhabitants of neighboring villages, whom he contrasts with those in Grantchester. The people of Cambridge are said to be “urban, squat, and packed with guile,” while oaths—or worse—are flung at visitors to Over and Trumpington. He complains that “Ditton girls are mean and dirty,/ And there’s none in Harston under thirty,” but Grantchester is described as a place of “peace and holy quiet.” Even the residents of Grantchester, however, are not immune to Brooke’s teasing; in a line that is perhaps only half in jest, given his own bouts of depression, he adds that “when they get to feeling old,/ They up and shoot themselves, I’m told.”
Yet there is also a seriousness in the poem underneath its comedic elements. In his conclusion, Brooke asks a series of rhetorical questions:
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
The poet longs for the remembered, if imagined, permanence of Grantchester, but he also sadly and whimsically recognizes even its ultimate impermanence and transience. Written only two years before the outbreak of World War I, the poem foreshadows the world that will be forever lost as a result of that conflict.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Poets of World War I: Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.
Delany, Robert. The Neo-Pagans. London: Macmillan, 1987.
Hassall, Christopher. Rupert Brooke: A Biography. London: Faber & Faber, 1964.
Jones, Nigel. Rupert Brooke: Life, Death, and Myth. London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999.
Lehmann, John. Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980.
Pearsall, Robert Brainard. Rupert Brooke: The Man and the Poet. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1974.
Quinn, Patrick, ed. British Poets of the Great War: Brooke, Rosenberg, Thomas, a Documentary Volume. Vol. 216 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000.
Ross, Robert H. The Georgian Revolt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965.
Stallworthy, Jon. Great Poets of World War I: Poetry from the Great War. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002.