Ornaments

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



Bring from the east, bring from the west,
Flowers for the hair, gems for the vest ;
Bring the rich silks that are shining with gold,
Wrought in rich broidery on every fold,

Bring ye the perfumes that breathe on the rose,
Such as the summer of Egypt bestows ;
Bring the white pearls from the depths of the sea —
They are fair like the neck where their lustre will be.

Such are the offerings that now will be brought,
But can they bring peace to the turmoil of thought ?
Can they one moment of quiet bestow
To the human heart, feverish and beating, below ?
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on July 17, 2016

Modified on March 05, 2023

31 sec read
111

Quick analysis:

Scheme AABB CCDD EEFF
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 556
Words 104
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4

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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