I've been missing England a lot lately. Last week there was a confluence of the universe pouring salt on that wound. First I found out via Facebook that a girl I knew in middle school has begun her graduate studies at Oxford University, which admitedly filled me with a fair amount of envy and dispair at my lack of Oxford-level credentials. As soon as I was recovering from that bout of woe, I discovered that my reading for Victorian Lit that evening was to be Matthew Arnold's "The Scholar Gipsy" and "Thyrsis" which are set in and are all about OXFORD and roaming the villages and hills around the city. Boohoo to me.
There was an uplifting part to all of this Oxford-nostalgia, though, when I got an unexpected e-mail in my box. My friend and bartender from the pub I always went to remembered I had given him my e-mail address and wrote to see how I was doing. Clearly he must have sensed the universe was conspiring to make me long for England and felt compelled to see how I was doing. We've been corresponding ever since and it's nice to know that while I may not be studying at Oxford, and while I may not be roaming the countryside like Matthew Arnold's narrators, I have friends in England who remember me. That's pretty cool. It's nice to know that whenever I go back, I'll have someone to visit and say hello to. That was one of my favorite things about getting to go back to the same town and same manor house two summers in a row-- I got to see the same friendly faces I'd never expected to see again after the first summer. So it's nice to keep in touch better than before, especially when it is so uncertain when I might be able to return.
Since I don't exactly have a picture to include with this post, I'll link to the English Heritage View Finder, a searchable archive of historic photos taken in England. Here is a photo of my manor house taken in 1917, and this is what I am almost positive is now the Turnpike Inn circa 1917. If I'm right, that road in the foreground in now a major ring road and highway-- the main road into Oxford from Kiddlington and Yarnton. And Woodstock, the next village over from Yarnton, looks exactly the same today as it does in this 1900 photo. Amazing. I'm so thankful that my Victorian Lit professor shared this website while making me all homesick with those Matthew Arnold poems.
Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe,
Returning home on summer-nights, have met
Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,
As the punt's rope chops round;
And leaning backward in a pensive dream,
And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers
Pluck'd in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers,
And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream.
-Matthew Arnold, "The Scholar Gipsy"
Leave a comment