Landor
Page 5
I love you for your few caresses,
I love you for my many tears.
93
PORTRAIT
Thy skin is like an unwasht carrot’s,
Thy tongue is blacker than a parrot’s,
Thy teeth are crooked, but belong
Inherently to such a tongue.
94
He who sits thoughtful in a twilight grot
Sees what in sunshine other men see not.
I walk away from what they run to see,
I know the world, but the world knows not me.
95
There are who say we are but dust,
We may be soon, but are not yet,
Nor should be while in Love we trust
And never what he taught forget.
96
LIFE’S ROMANCE
Life’s torne Romance we thumb throughout the day:
Cast it aside: ’tis better this be done
Ere fall between its leaves the dust that none
Can blow away.
97
There is a time when the romance of life
Should be shut up, and losed with double clasp:
Better that this be done before the dust
That none can blow away falls into it.
98
Death stands above me, whispering low
I know not what into my ear:
Of his strange language all I know
Is, there is not a word of fear.
99
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 me with that name alone,
Harmonious name, which other bards may sing,
But her bright image in my darkest hour
Comes back, in vain comes back, call’d or uncall’d.
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.
100
A FRIEND TO THEOCRITOS IN EGYPT
Dost thou not often gasp with longdrawn sighs,
Theocritos, recalling Sicily?
Glorious is Nile, but rather give me back
Our little rills, which fain would run away
And hide themselves from persecuting suns
In summer, under oleander boughs,
And catch its roses as they flaunt above.
Here are no birds that sing, no sweeter flower
Than tiny fragile weak-eyed resida,
Which faints upon the bosom it would cool.
Altho’ the royal lotos sits aloof
On his rich carpet, spred from wave to wave,
I throw myself more gladly where the pine
Protects me, loftier than the palace-roof,
Or where the linden and acacia meet
Across my path, in fragrance to contend.
Bring back the hour, Theocritos, when we
Shall sit together on a thymy knoll,
With few about us, and with none too nigh,
And when the song of shepherds and their glee
We may repeat, perchance and gaily mock,
Until one bolder than the rest springs up
And slaps us on the shoulder for our pains.
Take thou meanwhile these two papyrus-leaves,
Recording, one the loves and one the woes
Of Pan and Pitys, heretofore unsung.
Aside our rivers and within our groves
The pastoral pipe hath dropt its mellow lay,
And shepherds in their contests only try
Who best can puzzle.
Come, Theocritos,
Come, let us lend a shoulder to the wheel
And help to lift it from this depth of sand.
NOTES
The dates given for the poems are those of their first publication or, where these are known, of their composition. The dates in square brackets are those of the last edition published during Landor’s lifetime, and indicate that the latest such revision has been followed in this printing. Landor had some idiosyncratic views and practices in the matter of spelling, such as ‘coucht’, walkt’, ‘ceast’, ‘herse’, ‘indocil’, ‘worne’, but was not consistent in their use (or they were normalised by copy-editors and compositors). I have, as a rule, followed them save in a very few instances where they look so odd as to distract the modern reader from the poem, and in those few cases I have silently modernised them.
Most of the poems are untitled, though sometimes titles seem to have been supplied by magazine-editors, probably without Landor’s knowledge or prior consent. In at least one case, the ‘Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher’, his best- known quatrain (p 59), we know that he gave it this title himself, in a letter written to John Forster on his (Landor’s) 74th birthday. But when he printed it, as the epigraph to Last Fruit, he suppressed the title. I think he was right to do so, and have followed him here. In other cases I have given some early but possibly non-Landorian titles in square brackets. Those without brackets appeared in his books.
1 1859. The poem stands at the head of the second separate edition of the Hellenics. Simöis has three syllables
2 1806 [1846]. Rose Aylmer died at the age of 20 in 1800, in Calcutta.
3 1806. Imitated and expanded from a fragmentary poem by Sappho (6th century BC). The original is of only two lines.
4 1836. In Pericles and Aspasia. There is no Greek original for this poem.
5 1836. In Pericles and Aspasia. Latona was the mother of Apollo. Tanagra, in Boeotia, was the birthplace of Corinna and is now famous for its terracotta figurines.
6 1806 [1846].
7 1824. Alcestis, the wife of King Admetus, was brought back from Hades by Hercules. Play by Euripides and operas by Gluck and others.
8 1838.
9 1831 [1846]. One of the many love-poems addressed by Landor to Sophia Jane Swift, later (having married a distant cousin) Mrs Swifte, and later still Comtesse de Molandé, whom Landor called ‘Ianthe’ and with whom he sustained an amorous friendship for nearly half a century, from 1803 till her death in 1851.
10 1831. Again to Ianthe.
11 1831. Charon is the ferryman on the river Styx.
12 1837.
13 1836. In Pericles and Aspasia.
14 1833. Extracted from ‘To Robert Southey’ a poem of 58 lines.
15 1831.
16 1795. From The Poems of Walter Savage Landor 1795. Not reprinted by Landor. ‘Ariston men Hydor’ (water is best): a well known saying by the philosopher Thales of Miletus, repeated by the 4th-century poet Pindar and inscribed over the Pump Room at Bath.
17 1836. In Pericles and Aspasia.
18 1834. In The Examination … of William Shakespeare. One of the few high points in that laboured and arid work.
19 1836. In Pericles and Aspasia.
20 1828 [1846].
21 1834. Another cheerful moment in the Shakespeare book (see No 18 above). This little poem is put into the mouth of Shakespeare during his supposed trial for deer-stealing.
22 1836. In Pericles and Aspasia. Mimnermus was a 7th-century poet. There is no original for this poem. Priapus, the ithyphallic god of gardens, was originally worshipped at Lampsacus on the Hellespont (see the next poem No 23). His statue was ‘a. sort of combined scarecrow and garden deit
y’.
23 1836. In Pericles and Aspasia. See note on preceding poem.
24 1831. The poet is perhaps Henry Vaughan (1622-95), buried at Llansaintffraed, Brecon, not very far from Landor’s estate at Llanthony.
25 1838. Addressed to William Fisher, whose portrait of Landor is now in the National Portrait Gallery.
26 1831 [1846]. Landor lived in the Villa Gherardesca at Fiesole from 1829 till 1835, when he left his family and returned to England. I have preferred some readings from the 1831 text.
27 1827. See note on previous poem.
28 1842. A very faithful translation of Moschus: the closing lines of the Lament for Bion (100–105).
29 1846. Epicurus (a real person) appears with the two young girls, Leontion and Ternissa, in Landor’s Imaginary Conversation of that name. As Hardy sometimes did with characters in his stories, and as Yeats did, Landor wrote poems about them afterwards.
30 1840. Addressed to Rose Paynter, great-niece of Rose Aylmer (see No 2), who had been painted by William Fisher (see No 25) in the Villa Gherardesca (see No 26).
31 1846. Another poem from the Villa Gherardesca period (1829–35).
32 1846. Evidently addressed to Ianthe (see No 9)
33–34 1846.
35 1839 [1846].
36–37 1846.
38 1846. ‘Iris’ is the rainbow.
39 1845.
40–43 1846.
44 1846. Interpolated in 1846 in the Imaginary Conversation between Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney, first published in 1824.
45–49 1846.
50 1838 [1846].
51–57 1846.
58 1849.
59 1853. Dirce is a fountain and stream at Thebes (birthplace of Pindar), and the Ilissus is of course at Athens.
60 1853. Landor here broke his own rule that ‘the two-word rhyme is only fit for ludicrous subjects’ (WSL to Forster, 1843).
61 1850. lines 19–21: Queen Elizabeth was born at Greenwich, and Oliver Cromwell died at Whitehall.
62 1851 [1853].
63 1863.
64 1853.
65 1863.
66 1853.
67 1855.
68 1853. Frederick Augustus, second son of George III, bishop of Osnaburg, whose statue (not bust) stands on the column at the bottom of Regent Street. Tyburn is the place of execution.
69 1854.
70–71 1853.
72 1858. Probably written in 1854.
73 1853.
74 1857.
75 1863. Richard Porson (1759–1808), Cambridge Greek scholar renowned for his potations.
76 1863.
77 1852.
78 date unknown: first printed 1897.
79 1863. ‘Agen’ is Landor’s spelling.
80 1859. From ‘Appendix to the Hellenics’, a poem of 84 lines.
81 1850. From ‘To the Reverend Cuthbert Southey’, a poem of 48 lines, of which these are the concluding eight.
82 1853.
83–84 1863.
85 1853. Probably Henry Philipotts, Bishop of Exeter (1778–1869).
86 date unknown: first printed 1878.
87 1858.
88 1858. Printed on its own (contrast No 44).
89–92 1858.
93 date unknown: first printed 1897.
94 1863.
95 1853.
96 1858.
97–98 1853.
99 1863. Stephen Wheeler, Landor’s editor, put this among the ‘Ianthe’ poems, but the thought of the first few lines occurs in a letter to Forster of December 1855, when he was writing his Antony and Octavius scenes, and Ianthe had been dead for four years.
100 1863. Theocritus, the greatest of the Greek pastoral poets, was a native of Sicily in which his poems were set, but retired to Alexandria in later life.
Index of First Lines
A hearse is passing by in solemn state 65
Again, perhaps and only once again 61
Ah what avails the sceptred race 5
Ah! when the mallow in the croft dies down 33
All is not over while the shade 72
Boastfully call we all the world our own 44
Come back, ye wandering Muses, come back home 1
Come forth, old lion, from thy den 85
Conceal not Time’s misdeeds, but on my brow 26
Death indiscriminately gathers 84
Death stands above me. whispering low 89
Death, tho I see him not, is near 73
Demophile rests here: we will not say 21
Dost thou not often gasp with longdrawn sighs 91
Dull is my verse: not even thou 38
Enduring is the bust of bronze 70
Fair maiden! when I look at thee 86
Fate! I have askt few things of thee 51
From yonder wood mark blue-eyed Eve proceed 10
From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass 56
George the First was always reckoned 69
Gratefully shy is yon gazelle 76
Had we two met, blithe-hearted Burns 21
He who in waning age would moralise 41
He who sits thoughtful in a twilit grot 87
Here, ever since you went abroad 39
Here lies Landor 85
Here, where precipitate Spring with one light bound 36
How many verses have I thrown 87
How soon, alas, the hours are over 49
I leave thee, beauteous Italy! no more 30
I seek not many, many seek not me 82
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife 59
I wish not Thasos rich in mines 24
Idle and light are many things you see 56
If I extoll’d the virtuous and the wise 81
In Clementina’s artless mien 19
In spring and summer winds may blow 46
Is it not better at an early hour 56
Kind souls! who strive what pious hand shall bring 26
Lately our poets loiter’d in green lanes 65
Leaf after leaf drops off, flower after flower 68
Life (priest and poet say) is but a dream 16
Life’s torne Romance we thumb throughout the day 89
Mild is the parting year, and sweet 14
Mother, I cannot mind my wheel 6
My guest! I have not led you thro’ 53
My pictures blacken in their frames 74
Naturally, as fall upon the ground 20
Niconöe is inclined to deck 24
Night airs that make tree-shadows walk, and sheep 48
O friends! who have accompanied me thus far 54
On love, on grief 20
‘Our couch shall be roses all spangled with dew’ 86
Past ruin’d Ilion Helen lives 13
Remain, ah not in youth alone 37
Retire, and timely, from the world, if ever 46
Sharp crocus wakes the froward year 71
Sleep! who contractest the waste realms of night 11
Smiles soon abate; the boisterous throes 12
So then! I feel not deeply; if I did 64
Stand close around, ye Stygian set 15
Sweet was the song that Youth sang once 50
Tanagra! think not I forget 8
Tell me not things past belief 40
Tell me not what well I know 75
Ten thousand flakes about my windows blow 48
Ternissa! you are fled 34
The basket upon which thy fingers bend 35
The brightest mind, when sorrow sweeps across 48
The cattle in the common field 80
The grateful heart for all things blesses 87
The leaves are falling; so am I 55
The mermaid sat upon the rocks 23
The mother of the Muses, we are taught 90
The scentless laurel a broad leaf displays 84
There are who say we are but dust 88
There falls with every wedding-chime 66
There is a delight in singing, though no
ne hear 43
There is a mountain and a wood between us 61
There is a time when the romance of life 98
Thou hast not rais’d, Ianthe, such desire 38
Thy skin is like an unwasht carrot’s 87
To hide her ordure, claws the cat 84
’Twas far beyond the midnight hour 77
Twenty years hence my eyes may grow 45
Various the roads of life; in one 48
We hurry to the river we must cross 18
We mind not how the sun in the mid-sky 17
Welcome, old friend! These many years 79
Well I remember how you smiled 80
What bitter flowers surround the fount of pleasure 85
When the mad wolf hath bit the scatter’d sheep 84
Where three huge dogs are ramping yonder 36
Why do I praise a peach 60
Why, why repine, my pensive friend 52
Will mortals never know each other’s station 42
Wormwood and rue be on his tongue 7
Ye lie, friend Pindar! and friend Thales 20
Ye who have toil’d uphill to reach the haunt 78
Copyright
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in 1999 by
The Lilliput Press
62–63 Sitric Road,
Arbour Hill
Dublin 7, Ireland
www.lilliputpress.ie
This digital edition published 2013 by
The Lilliput Press
Copyright © Maurice Craig, 2012
ISBN print paperback 903 56 0259
ISBN eBook 978 18 435 13537
A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.
The Lilliput Press receives financial assistance from
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