The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

For the building, see Old Vicarage, Grantchester.

"The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" is a light poem by the English Georgian poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), written in Berlin in 1912. Initially titled "The Sentimental Exile", Brooke, with help from his friend Edward Marsh, renamed it to its the title the poem is commonly known as.[1]

The title refers to the Old Vicarage, a house Brooke briefly lived in the village of Grantchester near Cambridge.[2] The poem's references can be overly obscure because of the many specific Cambridgeshire locations (such as "Haslingfield and Coton") and English traditions to which the poem refers. Some, including George Orwell, have seen it as sentimentally nostalgic,[3][4] while others have recognised its satiric and sometimes cruel humour.

Using octosyllabics—a metre Brooke often employed[5]—Brooke 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.

  1. ^ Miller, Alisa (2017). Rupert Brooke in the First World War. Liverpool University Press. p. 27. ISBN 978-1-942954-34-7.
  2. ^ Johnston, John H. (1964). English Poetry of the First World War. Princeton University Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-691-06038-5.
  3. ^ Orwell, George (1940). Inside the whale and other essays. Penguin classics. London: Penguin Books (published 1962). p. 21. ISBN 978-0-14-118580-4.
  4. ^ Johnston, John H. (1964). English Poetry of the First World War. Princeton University Press. pp. 3–4. ISBN 978-0-691-06038-5.
  5. ^ e.g., "Heaven" and "Tiare Tahiti" (both 1914)