Rupert Brooke's 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester' — England as Fortress
Poets involved
What happened
Rupert Brooke wrote 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester' in 1912 while sitting in a Berlin café, homesick for the village outside Cambridge where he had spent his golden student years. The poem celebrates an idealised English pastoral landscape — church, vicarage, river — but its nostalgia is fundamentally about an England as a defended sanctuary of beauty and civilisation against the industrialised world outside. Published in New Numbers in 1914, it became one of the most read poems in Britain during the First World War.
Literary impact
Brooke's poem established the pastoral-fortress idea — England as an enclosed garden-country to be defended — that proved so potent in early war poetry. The same impulse that made the medieval castle a symbol of civilised order against the wilderness appears here transposed to the English village. This defensive pastoral shaped the early war poems of Brooke himself, Edward Thomas, and many others who conceived of the war as a defence of an English world whose architecture — even domestic — needed preserving.
Source: Wikipedia
