The Coronation

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



What memories haunt the venerable pile !
It is the mighty treasury of the past,
Where England garners up her glorious dead.
The ancient chivalry are sleeping there —
Men who sought out the Turk in Palestine,
And laid the crescent low before the cross.
The sea has sent her victories : those aisles
Wave with the banners of a thousand fights.
There, too, are the mind's triumphs — in those tombs
Sleep poets and philosophers, whose light
Is on the heaven of our intellect.
The very names inscribed on those old walls
Make the place sacred.
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on November 25, 2016

Modified on March 05, 2023

28 sec read
107

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCDEFGHIJKLM
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 542
Words 95
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 13

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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