Love's Happiness

Letitia Elizabeth Landon 1802 (Chelsea) – 1838 (Cape Coast)



There are a thousand fanciful things
Link'd round the young heart's imaginings.
In its first love-dream, a leaf or a flower,
Is gifted then with a spell and a power ;
A shade is an omen, a dream is a sign,
From which the maiden can well divine
Passion's whole history. Those only can tell
Who have loved as young hearts can love so well,
How the pulses will beat, and the cheek will be dyed,
When they have some love augury tried.
Oh ! it is not for those whose feelings are cold,
Wither'd by care, or blunted by gold ;
Whose brows have darken'd with many years,
To feel again youth's hopes and fears
What they now might blush to confess,
Yet what made their spring-day's happiness !
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on May 03, 2016

Modified on March 05, 2023

40 sec read
65

Quick analysis:

Scheme AABBCCDDEEFFGGHI
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 687
Words 127
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 16

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an English poet. Born 14th August 1802 at 25 Hans Place, Chelsea, she lived through the most productive period of her life nearby, at No.22. A precocious child with a natural gift for poetry, she was driven by the financial needs of her family to become a professional writer and thus a target for malicious gossip (although her three children by William Jerdan were successfully hidden from the public). In 1838, she married George Maclean, governor of Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast, whence she travelled, only to die a few months later (15th October) of a fatal heart condition. Behind her post-Romantic style of sentimentality lie preoccupations with art, decay and loss that give her poetry its characteristic intensity and in this vein she attempted to reinterpret some of the great male texts from a woman’s perspective. Her originality rapidly led to her being one of the most read authors of her day and her influence, commencing with Tennyson in England and Poe in America, was long-lasting. However, Victorian attitudes led to her poetry being misrepresented and she became excluded from the canon of English literature, where she belongs. more…

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