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09-18-2014, 07:10 AM
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Location: Lazio, Italy
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Walter Savage Landor
I came across this discussion about Landor's poem "Memory" at Robert Pinsky's Poetry Forum. The poem is quoted too, of course, but I'll post it here as well:
Memory
The mother of the Muses, we are taught,
Is Memory: she has left me; they remain,
And shake my shoulder, urging me to sing
About the summer days, my loves of old.
Alas! alas! is all I can reply.
Memory has left with me that name alone,
Harmonious name, which other bards may sing,
But her bright image in my darkest hour
Comes back, in vain comes back, called or uncalled.
Forgotten are the names of visitors
Ready to press my hand but yesterday;
Forgotten are the names of earlier friends
Whose genial converse and glad countenance
Are fresh as ever to mine ear and eye;
To these, when I have written, and besought
Remembrance of me, the word Dear alone
Hangs on the upper verge, and waits in vain.
A blessing wert thou, O oblivion,
If thy stream carried only weeds away,
But vernal and autumnal flowers alike
It hurries down to wither on the strand.
--Walter Savage Landor
It's a beauty, is it not? I checked the Sphere archives, and since there has never been a thread on Landor, a poet I hardly know, I thought: let's start one.
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09-18-2014, 08:00 AM
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Join Date: May 2009
Location: Inside the Beltway
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Andrew,
I've always been a little puzzled by these lines from Yeats:
"I know what wages beauty gives,
How hard a life her servant lives,
Yet praise the winters gone;
There is not a fool can call me friend,
And I may dine at journey’s end
With Landor and with Donne."
OK, Donne, sure. But Landor? One doesn't hear much about him. Somewhere in Waugh, maybe in Brideshead, the dying song of an old philosopher gets used to mock a rather shallow character, who quotes it insincerely. And we do hear that one batted around occasionally.
Of course, Landor was really quite good with short, tight stanzas, carefully wrought. Maybe that's why Yeats liked him so much? I'm a desperately impatient reader, so I can't get through his longer ones, like the one you posted. But the fault is in me, not in the poems themselves. On the other hand, if you want short, tight, and memorable, Landor's your guy:
Stand close around, ye Stygian set,
With Dirce in one boat conveyed,
Or Charon, seeing, may forget
That he is old and she a shade.
Best,
Bill
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09-18-2014, 08:16 AM
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: Yorkshire, UK
Posts: 2,479
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In his ABC of Reading (1934) Ezra Pound cites eleven of Landor’s poems as “exhibits” and offers an interesting and characteristically Poundian discussion of Landor (page 179 and following). A PDF of the text can be found here: http://monoskop.org/images/a/a4/Poun...of_Reading.pdf.
Clive
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09-18-2014, 08:46 AM
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Thanks for the reminder about Pound's citing Landor, Clive. I plan to take a look at that. And Bill, yes, those Yeats lines are what made me ever even know about Landor to begin with. I had the same reaction as you did to them: Yeats was so not a classicist! You are probably right about the reason, since Yeats wrote quite a few short nugget-like pieces in his later years.
In the Landor poem I quoted to start the thread, the lines "the word Dear alone / Hangs on the upper verge" have such pathos--the enjambment feels like a pang of loss. Landor from what I have seen did have a marvelous ear.
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09-18-2014, 09:44 AM
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Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Minneapolis
Posts: 2,380
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Thanks, Andrew. Robert Pinsky advocated vigorously for Landor at West Chester in 2011, but I still haven't taken a dip.
This is interesting. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/...-savage-landor "A mad Jacobin," quoth Southey.
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09-18-2014, 10:49 AM
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Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Breaux Bridge, LA, USA
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I quote my favorite from memory:
Ah what avails the sceptered race,
And what the form divine,
What every virtue, every grace?
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see--
A night of memories and sighs
I consecrate to thee.
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09-18-2014, 03:56 PM
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Join Date: May 2013
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 2,238
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Like Bill I am an impatient reader but I took a deep breath and slowed down and reread this and did enjoy it. Often a gem like this is hidden behind it's style which can seem circuitous to a modern reader. I think for many at Eratosphere there is a great joy in reading 'old fashioned' poetry precisely because it demands a slower pace and a different appreciation of language.
The world is so fast, so demanding and we are so easily bored, it is reassuring to read great poetry from a bygone age when things were different.
Slow down, I say, slow down.
Last edited by ross hamilton hill; 09-18-2014 at 05:44 PM.
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09-19-2014, 06:45 AM
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Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Belmont MA
Posts: 4,802
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Landor was the last poet to write extensively in Latin as well as his vernacular language. Housman wrote one memorable love elegy in Latin decades later, but Landor was the last of a very long line.
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09-19-2014, 12:34 PM
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I believe Landor also wrote this one, shortly before he died at 90:
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art.
I warmed my hands before the fire of life:
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Nice work, old boy.
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09-19-2014, 02:45 PM
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Venice, Italy
Posts: 2,399
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Thanks, Andrew, for starting this thread. I've often thought I must explore his work but have never got round to doing so. And there are so many gems here that I realise I've been missing a lot. My curiosity was first aroused when I heard that Mr Boythorn in Bleak House was based on him. (Leigh Hunt also figures in the novel, of course, in a much less pleasant guise.)
Perhaps a possibly unconscious reason for my delaying to get to know him was that I read somewhere that he left Pisa in 1821 because he didn't want to meet Byron. Well, if nothing else, it was at least original on his part.
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