What is Success?

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



All things are symbols; and we find
    In morning's lovely prime,
The actual history of the mind
    In its own early time:
So, to the youthful poet's gaze,
    A thousand colours rise,—
The beautiful which soon decays.
    The buoyant which soon dies.

So does not die their influence,
    The spirit owns the spell;
Memory to him is music—hence
    The magic of his shell.
He sings of general hopes and fears—
    A universal tone;
All weep with him, for in his tears
They recognise their own.

Yet many a one, whose lute hangs now
    High on the laurel tree.
Feels that the cypress' dark bough
    A fitter meed would be :
And still with weariness and wo
    The fatal gift is won;
Many a radiant head lies low,
    Ere half its race be run.
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on December 02, 2016

Modified by Madeleine Quinn on March 04, 2020

40 sec read
74

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABABCDCD XEXEXFXF GHGHIJIJ
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 748
Words 133
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 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…

All Letitia Elizabeth Landon poems | Letitia Elizabeth Landon Books

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