The Deaf Schoolmaster

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



He cannot hear the skylark sing,
The music of the wild bee’s wing;
The murmur of the plaining bough ;
A gentle whisper fairy low;
The noise of falling waters near—
All these have left his mournful ear.
A sad, sad silence, whose worst power
Is felt in others’ gladdest hour.
But, ah, to what can it not move
Th' unconquerable strength of love !
See how he bends above the page,
For him—the child of his old age.
The ear is deaf, the eye is dim,
Yet anxious and alive for him.
How deep and tender is the debt,
Whose seal on that young heart is set;
Little, perchance, may be the aid,
Not so the fondness which essayed
To help amid this learned coil,
And smooth the youthful student's toil.
Mid all the sorrow and the crime,
Man's destiny from earliest time ;
Mid all that can debase, degrade,
How beautiful this earth is made,
By pure affection, deep and dear,
Affection like that pictured here !
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on May 16, 2016

Modified on March 05, 2023

50 sec read
39

Quick analysis:

Scheme AABCDEFFGHIIJJKKLKMMNNLLDE
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 877
Words 165
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 26

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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