Romance



Maiden, listen! thy hunter's horn—
Thrice has the wind its echo borne;
Should not this our moment of meeting be?
Hast thou no answer, maiden, for me?
Ah, yes, I can hear thy silvery feet,
Like the lute's music, light and sweet;
Soft on the air comes the breath of thy sigh,
As the odours that tell when the Spring hours are nigh.
Invisible, still I should feel thou wert near,
Be conscious that something was by me most dear.
Oh, haste thee, beloved, I've built thee a bower,
Not like the halls of thy father's tower—
Where the banners are sweeping o'er helm and o'er plume,
And crimson and gold clothe each stately room—
Where censers are burning with incense and light—
Where winecups of silver are foaming and bright—
Where an hundred minstrels sing thee to sleep—
While an hundred knights watch o'er those slumbers keep—
But my bower is built by an old oak tree,
With an ivy and woodbine canopy;
And the turf beneath is thickly set
With primrose, lily, and violet.
The nightingale, love, shall thy minstrel be;
And my two dark hounds shall be guards for thee;
And for crystal vases of eastern perfume,
The wild rose in the freshness of morning shall bloom;
And more than all, thou shalt have for thy slave
A heart that will beat for thee till in the grave.

About this poem

Fragments. 6th Series. From The Literary Gazette, 1824

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Written on 1824

Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on January 29, 2025

1:19 min read
4

Quick analysis:

Scheme AABBCCDDEEFFGGHHIIBBJKBBGGLL
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,300
Words 258
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 28

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

 · 1802 · Chelsea

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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