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 youA tunnel of green gloom, and
Deeply above; and green and
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.— Oh, damn! I know it! and I
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare
That run to bathe . . . Du lieber Gott !
Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperanmentvoll German
Drink beer around; — and there the
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there
Meads towards Haslingfield and
Where das Betreten's not verboten.ειθε γενοιμην . . . . would I
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —Some, it may be, can get in
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seenA 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
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
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river
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
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic
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
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far
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
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
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
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
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and
Unforgettable,
River-smell, and hear the
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden
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
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh!
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
Written at Cafe des Westens,
Berlin,
May
Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the meadows along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top with the great chapel of King's clear against the sky.
It is the favourite lament of Cambridge men that their "Umgebung" is so dull and monotonous compared with the rolling witchery of Oxfordshire.
Ironic that Poppy fields would play a bhg part in his life a few years later!
