The Woodland Brook

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



Thou art flowing, thou art flowing,
    Oh, small and silvery brook;
The rushes by thee growing,
    And with a patient look
The pale narcissus o’er thee bends
Like one who asks in vain for friends.

I bring not back my childhood,
    Sweet comrade of its hours;
The music of the wild wood,
    The colour of the flowers;
They do not bring again the dream
That haunted me beside thy stream.

When black-lettered old romances
    Made a world for me alone;
Oh, days of lovely fancies,
    Are ye for ever flown?
Ye are fled, sweet, vague, and vain,
So I cannot dream again.

I have left a feverish pillow
    For thy soothing song;
Alas, each fairy billow
    An image bears along,
Look where I will, I only see
One face too much beloved by me.

In vain my heart remembers
    What pleasure used to be,
My past thoughts are but embers
    Consumed by love for thee.
I wish to love thee less—and feel
A deeper fondness o’er me steal.
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on March 01, 2020

Modified on March 05, 2023

50 sec read
14

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABABCC DEDEFF XGXGXX HIHIJJ EJEJKK
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 904
Words 168
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 6, 6, 6, 6, 6

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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