Small Miseries

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



Life's smallest miseries are, perhaps, its worst :
Great sufferings have great strength : there is a pride
In the bold energy that braves the worst,
And bears proud in the bearing ; but the heart
Consumes with those small sorrows, and small shames,
Which crave, yet cannot ask for sympathy.
They blush that they exist, and yet how keen
The pang that they inflict !
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on November 25, 2016

Modified on March 14, 2023

18 sec read
332

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABACDEFG
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 364
Words 62
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 8

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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