Parting

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



We do not know how much we love,
    Until we come to leave ;
An aged tree, a common flower,
    Are things o'er which we grieve.
There is a pleasure in the pain
That brings us back the past again.

We linger while we turn away,
    We cling while we depart;
And memories, unmark'd till then,
    Come crowding on the heart.
Let what will lure our onward way,
Farewell's a bitter word to say.
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on May 13, 2016

Modified on March 05, 2023

22 sec read
392

Quick analysis:

Scheme XAXABB CDXDCC
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 380
Words 73
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 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…

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