The Jumma Musjid. - The Principal Mosque at Agra

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



Yon mosque alone remains to tell,
How glorious once did Agra rise,
When gilded roof and pinnacle
Met morning half-way in the skies.

Two mighty empires load the plain,
With palace, mosque, and tomb, and tower:
Out on the works man rears in vain!
Out on the vanity of power!

A conqueror poured forth wealth and blood,
And dome and temple rose sublime ;—
Now, what remains where Agra stood,
But dust and ruins, Death and Time!

Captain Elliot says, " that a single century, or even a shorter space of time, is sufficient to reduce the streets and bazaars of an Indian city to a level with the earth from whence they rose, and to become almost as if they had never been ; while the larger mosques and tombs remain with little deterioration, and stand as melancholy monuments of the earlier splendour and prosperity of the Eastern capitals." " The city of Agra was greatly embellished by the Emperor Akbar, and it certainly contains some of the most beautiful remains of architecture that are to be found in India, where the face of a vast country is covered with the ruins of two great empires." " Some of the tombs have been converted into dwelling-houses by the English inhabitants."
It was remarked by Bishop Heber, that " Vanity of vanities was surely never written in more legible characters than on the dilapidated arcades of Delhi." He might have said the same of Agra.
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on July 12, 2016

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:12 min read
125

Quick analysis:

Scheme XAXA BCBC XDXD XX
Characters 1,364
Words 249
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 2

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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