Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

PBS has a new, to me, English Masterpiece Mystery series, Grantchester. I watched one and enjoyed it. Then Sally watched one and she also enjoyed it. So now we have a new series to enjoy together in an otherwise meager repertoire of TV worth watching.

But all along there has been a mental itch. Where have I heard of Grantchester before? Just there beyond cognitive reach.

It finally came to me this morning, the first crack in the small mystery. A poem by T.S. Eliot. Googling quickly corrected me. Not Eliot, Brooke. Then it all came back to me. Many years ago in the early 1980s I went on a Rupert Brooke tear. Brooke is mostly remembered today as an emblem of that lost golden generation of young men consumed by The Great War. The Georgian poets. His most remembered poem is probably The Soldier

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

But he has many others that are wonderful poems of a tragic generation living out their young years before the flame of war swept them all away. I was quite taken with his ignored works.

One of which is The Old Vicarage, Grantchester written in 1912 when he was travelling in Germany. In it he evokes both a remembrance of youth, a love of the home ways, and a celebration of England's gentle nature. The whole poem is worth reading but I especially love the final lines describing the area around Grantchester in East Anglia.

Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
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 still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

I attended boarding school in East Anglia and Brooke's descriptions are especially evocative of that place and that time. Those last two lines so bitter sweetly recall an England that is no more, "Stands the Church clock at ten to three?/ And is there honey still for tea?"

A post script to that reading of Brooke's poems in the 1980s was that I was posted to England in the early 2000s. One weekend, we went up to Cambridge to visit some friends there. They had three children just offset from our own by a couple of years. With six young children, we spent the day roaming the water meadows, fields and streams around Cambridge, the children racing and running, laughing and playing in the gentle English sun. There was chestnuts shade and the water was sweet and cool. In the mid-afternoon we saw an old village church and went over to explore. A lovely old shaded cemetery with tombstones from centuries past, covered with lichen and hard to read. The kids climbed an old tree crouched close to the ground with huge limbs stretching out towards the sun.

It wasn't quite ten to three but it was the Grantchester village church.