Storrs, Windermere Lake

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



I WOULD I had a charmed bark,
To sail that lovely lake ;
Nor should another prow but mine
Its silver silence wake.
No oar should cleave its sunny tide;
But I would float along,
As if the breath that filled my sail
Were but a murmured song.

Then I would think all pleasant thoughts ;
Live early youth anew,
When hope took tones of prophecy,
And tones of music too;
And coloured life with its own hues—
The heart’s true Claude Lorraine—
The rich, the warm, the beautiful,
I’d live them once again.

Kind faces flit before my eyes,
Sweet voices fill my ear,
And friends I long have ceased to love,
I’ll still think loved, and here.
With such fair phantasies to fill,
Sweet Lake, thy summer air;
If thy banks were not Paradise,
Yet should I dream they were.

The calm and picturesque scenery of the Lake of Windermere might awake a thousand far more romantic visions than that of the return of the first warm feelings of youth. Shut out as it were from the world, and enshrined in delicious seclusion ; here might the weary heart dream itself away, and find the freshness of the spring-time of the spirit return upon it. Here, at the mansion of Colonel John Bolton—a circumstance which gives interest to the plate—did the late Mr. Canning retire from the whirl of public affairs ; and, to use the words of Fisher’s Illustrations of Lancashire, “here was restored, in some measure, the elasticity of a mind, whose lofty energies were ultimately, and for our country we may say prematurely, exhausted in the preservation of a nation's welfare.”
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on June 15, 2016

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:22 min read
79

Quick analysis:

Scheme XAXAXBXB XCXCXXXX XDXDXEXX E
Closest metre Iambic heptameter
Characters 1,532
Words 273
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8, 1

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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