The Hindoo Girl’s Song

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



Float on—float on—my haunted bark,
    Above the midnight tide;
Bear softly o'er the waters dark
    The hopes that with thee glide.

Float on—float on—thy freight is flowers,
    And every flower reveals
The dreaming of my lonely hours,
    The hope my spirit feels.

Float on—float on—thy shining lamp,
    The light of love, is there;
If lost beneath the waters damp,
    That love must then despair.

Float on—beneath the moonlight float
    The sacred billows o'er:
Ah, some kind spirit guards my boat,
    For it has gained the shore.

This song alludes to a well-known superstition among the young Hindoo girls. They make a little boat out of a cocoa-nut shell, place a small lamp and flowers within this tiny ark of the heart, and launch it upon the Ganges. If it float out of sight with its lamp still burning, the omen is prosperous; if it sinks, the love of which it questions, is ill-fated.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified by Madeleine Quinn on February 17, 2020

46 sec read
170

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GXGX X
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 898
Words 153
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 1

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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