A First Disappointment

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



The deep, the long, the dreaming hours,
    That I have past with thee,
When thou hadst not a single thought
    Of how thou wert with me.

I heard thy voice, I spoke again,
    I gazed upon thy face;
And never scene of actual life
    Could bear a deeper trace

Than all that fancy conjured up,
    And made thee look and say;
Till I have loathed reality,
    That chased such dream away.

Alas ! this is vain, fond, and false;
    Thy heart is not for me;
And, knowing this, how can I waste
    My very soul on thee?
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on July 24, 2016

Modified by Madeleine Quinn on March 02, 2020

28 sec read
377

Quick analysis:

Scheme XAXA XBXB XCAC XAXA
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 500
Words 96
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 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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