The Mind's Unrest

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



Mind, dangerous and glorious gift!
Too much thy native heaven has left
Its nature in thee, for thy light
To be content with earthly home.
It hath another, and its sight
Will too much to that other roam ;
And heavenly light, and earthly clay,
But ill bear with alternate sway :
Till jarring elements create
The evil which they sought to shun,
And deeper feel their mortal state
In struggling for a higher one.
There is no rest for the proud mind,
Conscious of its high powers confined ;
Vain dreams and feverish hopes arise,
It is itself its sacrifice.
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on July 24, 2016

Modified on March 05, 2023

29 sec read
133

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCDCDEEFGFGHHIJ
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 536
Words 98
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 16

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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