The Assar Mahal - Ruins near Agra

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



ALAS, o’er the palace in ruins,
Time has past with a terrible trace—
Yet still the vast shrine and the temple
Seem to speak of a mightier race
Than ours, which exists by the minute,
And builds but by contract and steam,
Till the spirit has no where to wander,
And the heart has no rest for its dream.

But here in the desolate palace,
So stedfast amid its decay,
With its vast halls and sculptures remaining,
The builder alone past away:
What visions arise up before us,
The infinite and the unknown,
Now hidden and vague as the meaning,
Concealed in each strangely carved stone!

Who knows but those mystical letters*
Might yield every secret of time—
Could the past be restored to the present,
Methinks ’twere a union sublime :
The past—dreaming, high and ideal,
The present—keen, selfish and wise,
’Twould be like the glorious old Grecian,
And again steal the fire from the skies.

We now make existence too actual,
’Twere better to float down the stream,
At the will of the wind and the current,
The best of our being a dream.
Alas, did I judge from experience,
Whatever the future may be,
I’d but ask of the past its illusions,
They were all that are precious to me.

* Most of the ancient buildings are covered with hieroglyphics.
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on August 04, 2016

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:06 min read
76

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCBXDXD EFGFEHGH XIJIXKXK CDJDXLAL X
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,218
Words 222
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8, 8, 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…

All Letitia Elizabeth Landon poems | Letitia Elizabeth Landon Books

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