Gossipping

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



These are the spiders of society;
They weave their petty webs of lies and sneers,
And lie themselves in ambush for the spoil.
The web seems fair, and glitters in the sun,
And the poor victim winds him in the toil
Before he dreams of danger, or of death.
Alas, the misery that such inflict!
A word, a look, have power to wring the heart.
And leave it struggling hopeless in the net
Spread by the false and cruel, who delight
In the ingenious torment they contrive.
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on December 06, 2016

Modified by Madeleine Quinn on March 04, 2020

26 sec read
390

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCDCEFGHIJ
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 463
Words 87
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 11

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…

All Letitia Elizabeth Landon poems | Letitia Elizabeth Landon Books

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