Grantchester Meadows (Waters) 7:28 1969 - from Ummagumma
In the sky a bird was heard to cry.
Misty morning whisperings and gentle stirring sounds
Belied the deathly silence that lay all around.
Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dog fox
-
Gone to ground.
See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the
water.
And a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees
Laughing
as it passes through the endless summer
Making for the sea.
In the
lazy water meadow I lay me down.
All around me golden sun flakes settle on
the ground.
Basking in the sunshine of a bygone afternoon
Bringing
sounds of yesterday into this city room.
Hear the lark harken to the
barking of the dark fox
Gone to ground.
See the splashing of the
kingfisher flashing to the water. You Tube Live Version
And a river of green is sliding unseen
beneath the trees.
In the lazy water meadow I lay me down.
All around
me golden sun flakes covering the ground.
Basking in the sunshine of a
bygone afternoon
Bringing sounds of yesterday into this city room.
Hear the lark harken to the barking of the dark fox
Gone to ground.
See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water.
And a river
of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees,
Laughing as it passes through
the endless summer making for the sea.
The internal rhyme, assonance and subtle imagery help the lyric slide endlessly along with the open tuned guitars and gentle effects and hushed voices. It creates a fantastic atmosphere contrasting the 'icy winds of night' with the 'golden sun flakes covering the ground' and basking in the 'lazy water medow' with the 'city room'. Is it describing an internal landscape too? I like the touches of personification where the water is ''laughing as it passes through'. First World War - Rupert Brooke wrote about Granchester too, (he studied at Cambridge) reflecitng on it from Berlin in 1912 - below -
THE OLD VICARAGE, GRANCHESTER - By Rupert Brook
(Café des Westens, Berlin, May 1912)
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 you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
-- Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . .Du lieber Gott!
Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; - and there the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten's not verboten.eiqe genoimhn . . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester!--
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A 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 lie
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 blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
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 go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
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 prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
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 parts
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 believe
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 creep
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 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?
Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, where his father taught classics and was a housemaster at Rugby
School.In 1906 he went to King's college, Cambridge, and became friends with G.E.
Moore, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and Leonard Fry, members of
the future Bloomsbury Group. In 1910 Brooke's father died suddenly, and Brooke
was for a short time in Rugby a deputy housemaster. Thereafter Brooke lived on
an allowance from his mother. In 1911 he worked on a thesis on the playwright
John Webster and the Elizabethan drama, and travelled in Germany and Italy. In
England he was a leader of a group of young 'Neo-pagans', who slept outdoors,
embraced a religion of nature, and swam naked - among others Virginia Woolf
joined the swimmers in Grantchester. However, sex was something that was not
part of the fun - "We don't copulate without marriage, but we do meet in cafes,
talk on buses, go on unchaperoned walks, stay with each other, give each other
books, without marriage," Brooke once told to his friend.
Brooke was a promising English poet who died young in World War I.
Brooke's best-known work is the sonnet sequence 1914 AND OTHER POEMS (1915), containing the famous 'The Soldier.' Poets have always glorified war, and Brooke did his best to continue the tradition, and sacrifice himself in this effort. His death made him the hero of the first phase of the war and a canonized symbol of all the gifted young people destroyed by the conflict. However, Brooke's poetry with its patriotic mood and naive enthusiasm went out of fashion as the realities of warfare were fully understood.
"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England."
(from 'The Soldier')
Comments