River Cam - Literature

Literature

"The Reeve's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales begins:

At Trumpyngtoun, nat fer fro Cantebrigge,

Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge,

Upon the whiche brook ther stant a melle;

And this is verray sooth that I yow telle:

A millere was ther dwellynge many a day.

The mill formerly stood by Brasley Bridge on Grantchester Road. The mill pond is extant and the foundations of the mill can be seen when the water is low.

Byron's Pool is named after the poet, Lord Byron, who is reputed to have swum there. It was certainly a bathing place for Rupert Brooke and the Cambridge neo-Pagans. Brooke used to canoe from Cambridge to lodgings in Grantchester, which included the Old Vicarage. His homesick poem of 1912 evokes the river:

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.

...

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?

—"The Old Vicarage, Grantchester", Collected Poems (1916)

One of Brooke's contemporaries, Gwen Darwin, later Raverat, grew up in the old mill by the Mill Pond. Her book, Period Piece, is a memoir of a childhood messing about on the river. The mill house is now part of Darwin College.

Children's author Philippa Pearce, who lived in Great Shelford until her death in December 2006, featured the Cam in her books, most notably Minnow on the Say. The river is renamed the River Say, with Great and Little Shelford becoming Great and Little Barley, and Cambridge becoming "Castleford" (not to be confused with the real town of the same name in West Yorkshire).

River Cam is referred to as "Camus, reverend Sire" in line 103 of John Milton's pastoral elegy Lycidas. Edward King, in whose memory the elegy was composed, was a fellow student at Cambridge.