Two views of an English village

In Grantchester, in Grantchester!—	35
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,	40
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,	45
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. Rupert Brooke   I once passed through Grantchester by bike. Fences, complicated iron gates and barbed wire in the surrounding fields tortured the eyes. A humble humdrumness emanated from the dirty little brick homes. A tomfool wind blew up a pair of drawers hung out to dry between two green stakes over the plant-beds of a pauper’s vegetable garden. The faint tenor of a hoarse gramophone wafted up from the river.  Vladimar Nabokov This is vintage Nabokov – one poet casting a baleful eye on another’s arcadia.