Grantchester

Today, members of our Major course joined forces with English Lit students for a walk to Grantchester. The weather was perfect for our outing - slightly (mercifully?) cooler than earlier in the week, but with enough sunshine to keep our spirits up! We had a proper English tea at Grantchester's celebrated Orchard Tea Gardens, former stomping ground of Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brooke, and E.M. Forster. Students loaded their trays with miniature tea pots, jugs of milk, enormous scones, clotted cream, honey, and a seemingly infinite variety of jams. 

On our walk back, we paused for a reading of Rupert Brooke's famous "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" (1912):

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?