"The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" is a light poem by the English Georgian poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), written in Berlin in 1912.
The landscape of Cambridgeshire is reproduced in the poem, but Brooke, the academic, populates this English world with allusions and references from history and myth.
He compares the countryside to a kind of Greek Arcadia, home to nymphs and fauns, and refers to such famous literary figures as Lord Byron, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Tennyson.
[7] The final two lines of the poem are quoted Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here (1935)[8] and in Frank Muir and Denis Norden's comedy sketch Balham, Gateway to the South (1949).
The Greek phrase εἴθε γενοίμην (formally "would I were", or in more modern idiom, "I wish I was") from the poem is quoted by Patrick Leigh Fermor in Iain Moncrieffe's essay for the epilogue to W. Stanley Moss's Ill Met by Moonlight (1950),[9] as well as in John Betjeman's poem "The Olympic Girl" (1954).