Hall i th' Wood



CHANGE, change, wondrous change,
Mighty is thy power, and strange ;
Summer sleeps beneath the snow,
Fading follows autumn’s glow :
Time, what has its chronicle,
But of thee and thine to tell ?
What can yonder house record ?
First it had the feudal Lord,
He whose banner swept the land,
Which he held with red right hand ;
He of ’scutcheon, shield, and plume,
Rule of iron, will of doom.

        Next there came the Cavalier,
Light of word, and gay of cheer ;
He who held the right divine,
Floated best in good red wine :
Reckless reveller died he,
In his exile o’er the sea.

Followed him, the Squire who found,
Chief delight in horse and hound :
Merry then was Christmas time,
Kept with carol, masque, and mime ;
Glad the red hearth lit the hall,
There was welcome then for all.

        Last there was the Man of skill,
Wind and wave were at his will:
Thought and industry combined,
One whose hand was taught by mind ;
Toil and science, unto those,
Vast the debt that England owes.

Such the change yon House hath seen,
Surely best the last hath been :
Such the blessings brought by peace,
Patient toil and its increase.
Better far than broil and brand,
Art and labour in the land.

“Considerable obscurity invests the ancient history of this antiquated edifice: of several dates existing upon various parts of the building, the earliest is 1591.”—“In 1770, part of this old mansion was inhabited by Mr. Samuel Crompton, an inhabitant of the parish of Bolton; and it was here that he invented and constructed a machine, which, from its combining the principles of the spinning-jenny and the water-frame, was named a mule.” The progressive improvement in the manufacture of muslins and cambrics, that resulted from Mr. Crompton's scientific labours, occasioned the latter to be brought under the consideration of parliament, when a grant of £5000 was awarded to the inventor.—Fisher's Illustrations of Lancashire.
It is, therefore, no poetical fiction, to suppose that this house has had occupiers who would represent the various social changes in England.
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on August 13, 2016

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:44 min read
91

Quick analysis:

Scheme AABBXXCCDDEE FFGGHH IIJJKK LLMMNN XXOODD XX
Closest metre Iambic heptameter
Characters 2,035
Words 346
Stanzas 6
Stanza Lengths 12, 6, 6, 6, 6, 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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