Etty's Rover



Thou lovely and thou happy child,
Ah, how I envy thee !
I should be glad to change our state,
If such a thing might be.

And yet it is a lingering joy
To watch a thing so fair,
To think that in our weary life
Such pleasant moments are.

A little monarch thou art there,
And of a fairy realm,
Without a foe to overthrow,
A care to overwhelm.

Thy world is in thy own glad will,
And in each fresh delight,
And in thy unused heart, which makes
Its own, its golden light

With no misgivings in thy past,
Thy future with no fear ;
The present circles thee around,
An angel’s atmosphere.

How little is the happiness
That will content a child—
A favourite dog, a sunny fruit,
A blossom growing wild.

A word will fill the little heart
With pleasure and with pride ;
It is a harsh, a cruel thing,
That such can be denied.

And yet how many weary hours
Those joyous creatures know ;
How much of sorrow and restraint
They to their elders owe !

How much they suffer from our faults !
How much from our mistakes !
How often, too, mistaken zeal
An infant’s misery makes !

We overrule, and overteach,
We curb and we confine,
And put the heart to school too soon,
To learn our narrow line.

No ; only taught by love to love,
Seems childhood’s natural task ;
Affection, gentleness, and hope,
Are all its brief years ask.

Enjoy thy happiness, sweet child,
With careless heart and eye ;
Enjoy those few bright hours which now,
E’en now, are hurrying by ;

And let the gazer on thy face
Grow glad with watching thee,
And better, kinder ;—such at least
Its influence on me.
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on November 02, 2016

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:25 min read
91

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABXB XCXX CDED XFGF XHXH XAXA XIXI XEXE XGXG XJXJ XKXK ALXL XBXB
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,533
Words 286
Stanzas 13
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 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…

All Letitia Elizabeth Landon poems | Letitia Elizabeth Landon Books

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