Landor Read online

  WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

  ONE HUNDRED POEMS

  Selected and Introduced by

  MAURICE CRAIG

  MERRION / LILLIPUT

  London and Dublin

  In memory of

  Geoffrey Taylor & Vivian Mercier

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Proem

  POEMS PUBLISHED BEFORE 1837

  2 Rose Aylmer

  3 from Sappho

  4 from Alcaeus

  5 Corinna to Tanagra

  6 Progress of Evening

  7 To Sleep

  8 Smiles soon abate

  9 Past ruin’d Ilion

  10 Mild is the parting year

  11 Dirce

  12 Lines to a Dragon Fly

  13 Cleone to Aspasia

  14 We hurry to the river

  15 In Clementina’s artless mien

  16 On a Quaker’s tankard

  17 On love, on grief

  18 Naturally

  19 Demophilè rests here

  20 To Burns

  21 The Mermaid

  22 To Priapus

  23 from Mimnermus

  24 On a Poet in a Welsh Churchyard

  25 To a Painter

  26 Fæsulan Idyl

  27 Farewell to Italy

  POEMS PUBLISHED IN 1846–7

  28 from Moschus

  29 Leontion on Ternissa’s death

  30 On seeing her sit for her portrait

  31 The Fæsulan Villa

  32 Remain, ah not in youth alone

  33 Dull is my verse

  34 Thou hast not rais’d

  35 What News (sent to Lady Blessington)

  36 Tell me not things

  37 He who in waning age

  38 Milton

  39 To Robert Browning

  40 Boastfully call we all the world

  41 Twenty years hence

  42 In spring and summer

  43 Retire, and timely

  44 Night airs

  45 The brightest mind

  46 Ten thousand flakes

  47 Various the roads of life

  48 Plays

  49 Sweet was the song

  50 Fate! I have askt few things

  51 Why, why repine

  52 My guest! I have not led you

  53 O friends! who have accompanied

  54 The leaves are falling

  55 From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass

  56 Idle and light

  57 Is it not better

  POEMS PUBLISHED IN 1849–1864

  58 I strove with none

  59 Why do I praise a peach

  60 Separation

  61 In memory of Lady Blessington

  62 Remonstrance and Reply

  63 Lately our poets loiter’d

  64 There falls with every wedding chime

  65 A Funeral

  66 Leaf after leaf

  67 The Georges

  68 The Dule of York’s Statue

  69 March 24 1854

  70 All is not over

  71 Age

  72 Death of the Day

  73 On Catullus

  74 Destiny Uncertain

  75 ’Twas far beyond the midnight hour

  76 Ye who have toil’d uphill

  77 To Age

  78 The cattle in the common field

  79 Well I remember how you smiled

  80 from Appendix to the Hellenics

  81 from To Cuthbert Southey

  82 When the mad wolf

  83 Death indiscriminately gathers

  84 The scentless laurel

  85 A Quarrelsome Bishop

  86 Here lies Landor

  87 Come forth, old lion

  88 What bitter flowers

  89 A Reply to Tom Moore

  90 To a Fair Maiden

  91 Verses why Burnt

  92 The Grateful Heart

  93 Portrait

  94 He who sits thoughtful

  95 There are who say

  96 Life’s Romance

  97 There is a time

  98 Death stands above me

  99 Memory

  100 A Friend to Theocritos in Egypt

  NOTES

  INDEX OF FIRST LINES

  Copyright

  PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

  Landor is fortunate in his editor, Maurice Craig, who shares much of his wide learning. His eagerness to transmit his understanding and life-long admiration for Landor is reflected in this fresh collection.

  Merrion and Lilliput are happy to span the Irish Sea in publishing this anthology together, as a tribute both to W. S. Landor and to Maurice Craig.

  INTRODUCTION

  Landor will not fit in. He will neither stand up to be counted nor lie down as though dead. He is not an Augustan nor is he (for the most part) a Victorian, yet he is not quite an early Romantic either. His devotion to the concrete and his aversion to metaphysics sets him apart from them. As a prose-writer he is very much a special taste, and his lovers cannot justly complain if the vast majority of readers do not share their pleasure.

  But his poetry is another matter. His own remark that ‘Poetry was always my amusement, prose my study and business’ has been swallowed without examination. Heine, it will be remembered, made a disclaimer about his verse, in almost identical terms. Writers’ own statements about their work are almost always suspect. They may not themselves know the truth, or they may not be able to tell it. Or if they are they may not wish to tell it. Critics have spoken of ‘half a dozen perfect lyrics’ or ‘a score of lapidary poems’, and dismissed the rest of his, admittedly much too bulky, output as of no account. But good judges have thought otherwise.

  ‘No English writer – no English poet – of equal size and quality has been less attended to in the last fifty years’ wrote Geoffrey Grigson in 1964, and though three selections appeared in the next eight years, this remains broadly true. Landor the poet should, I believe, be kept apart from Landor the prose-writer, to be seen to best advantage. Most editors have mixed verse and prose, doing him dubious service.

  During the first 27 years of his adult life, till he was 45, his output was almost entirely in verse. The next seventeen years, from age 45 to age 62 (1820–1837) saw the production of the vast bulk of his prose Conversations and of the three long prose works. But for the next quarter-century he wrote mostly in verse, and more than half the poems in this book date from that period, or seem to do so. A considerable number were first published in 1846 when he was 71, and some of these may have been written ealier. But to judge by his publishing habits it is unlikely that many were. It is not easy to date Landor’s poems by their style, which changed very little.

  He wrote a great deal of occasional verse, most of it very trivial and some of it little more than doggerel. (I have nevertheless given one or two poems of this character, on their merits.) Like many of his contemporaries he wrote some lengthy verse ‘tales’ which are rarely memorable. And like almost everybody else from James Thomson to Robert Bridges he wrote tragedies in blank verse, with no better success than the rest.

  His greatest strength lies in lyric epigram and in the elegaic forms. He lacked, as he himself well knew, the architectonic power to sustain poetic quality in a long poem. He never wrote one as good as George Darley’s Nepenthe, yet he is a much more considerable poet than Darley, with a much wider range of effective human sympathy. The Landorian tone is unmistakable, inimitable and unparodyable.

  He had found his personal voice by the time he was thirty, if not earlier. It can be heard even in his ambitious epic Gebir, written probably when he was 20, while living with a girl in South Wales and fathering an illegitimate child. One of t
he best-known of his lyric epigrams, Rose Aylmer, was probably written very soon afterwards, though he improved it in 1831, when he was 56, and again, by the addition of one word, fifteen years later when he was 71. ‘Past ruin’d Ilion’, already a very good poem when first printed in 1831, was immeasurably improved in 1846 by the omission of the third stanza and the recasting of what had now become the last line.

  Gebir is still fairly accessible, so I have omitted it in toto. In only three cases, on pages 18, 82 and 83, have I given excerpts from longer poems. One of these seems designed to stand alone as an epigram. The other two are patches of glowing poetry in poems otherwise somewhat slack and diffuse.

  He is not a rural poet, as Wordsworth is, nor an urban poet like Prior or Pope. Rather he is the poet of a populated landscape, such as those which surround the cities of Florence and Bath, in which he spent so much of his life, or the idealised city-states of Greece and Ionia in which he set his Hellenics. Looked at in one light, he is the perfect product of the English public-school system: deeply versed in the classics and as much at home in Latin as in English, and a life-long rebel against authority in all its forms – except the linguistic, in which his respect for precedent is matched only by his own desire to be a legislator. Nor did he ever complain about the order of nature.

  ‘The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus sensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrows.’ The reader will find, in the pages which follow, this thought, here so perfectly expressed in prose, expressed again and again in verse, with varied imagery and emphasis, but with equal perfection. If romanticism means a yearning after the unattainable and an addiction to the mysterious, Landor was no romantic. What he sees of the world he sees clearly, and renders it with equal clarity. Regret there is, and in plenty (for he had much to regret), but always tempered with resignation. His melancholy is not the conventional melancholy of the eighteenth century. His epithets are sparingly used and freshly minted: ‘the peopled hills’ (page 13); ‘the entangling dance’ (page 17); ‘the flowering children and rough-rinded fathers’ (page 84).

  The theme of old man and young girl is constantly recurrent. As a husband and a father he was a failure, perhaps not altogether through his own fault. But his affectionate and avuncular relationships with a long succession of charming young women lie behind his Aesop and Rhodope, his Epicurus Leontion and Ternissa, his Anaxagoras in Pericles and Aspasia, and even the Agamemnon in his Iphigeneia fragment, to say nothing of numerous lyrics in the following pages and throughout his work. Though vigorous of body and of a susceptible temperament, he knew the score: ‘Were it possible,’ he wrote to a friend in 1838, ‘that a beautiful girl could love me (which I need scarcely say it is not) I would not let her: I would not be guilty of so cruel an imposture.’ Fifty years later Lady Aberdare recalled his ‘chivalry and fire and gentleness’.

  It is tempting to draw comparisons between Landor and Thomas Love Peacock. The superficial resemblances are obvious. They were very close contemporaries (Peacock ten years younger); both were steeped in classical literature; both wrote predominantly in dialogue form; both were involved with Wales; both were simultaneously radical and conservative; both stand aside from the literary mainstream of their time. Peacock’s last recorded words ‘By the immortal gods, I will not move!’ might well have been spoken by Landor. Both have always had their admirers.

  But, by contrast with Landor, Peacock, for all his foibles, is affable and approachable. He is, in his prose, pre-eminently a social writer, and a sociable one. Landor, by contrast, is, in his prose at least, always the heavyweight. Peacock’s poetry, with half-a-dozen shining exemptions, is pale and derivative. But in almost every line that Landor wrote, the Landorian note is heard. Even his least considerable scraps are clearly by a major poet. Peacock’s life, though not without its sorrows, was a success. Landor’s is remembered as a series of well spaced-out disasters. The marmoreal calm of his style stands in sharp contrast to the turbulence of his life: the self-defeating quarrels and the sudden rages which erupted sometimes in physical violence. ‘He had a loving heart’ observed Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘and was born to tyrannise.’ No writer has more aptly exemplified the antithesis between the chaos of life and the order of art.

  The order is, for the most part, a small-scale order. Only very rarely, as in the Scipio Polybius and Panaetius (prose) conversation, could he control any form more than a few pages long. We read his narratives less for the story-line than for their poetic texture. A partial exception is the Hellenics, the most coherent group of poems which he ever published. Ten of them were first written in Latin, and published before 1815, as Idyllia Heroica, and in 1846–7 he translated these into English and published them with eighteen similar poems in English, as The Hellenics of 1847. When, in 1859, a (very disorderly) fresh edition of the Hellenics appeared, nine of the Latin poems had been re-translated, in versions which are by no means always inferior to those of 1847.

  The 1847 Hellenics, and the full text of Gebir, are still reasonably accessible in the Temple Classics edition of 1907. These, along with some other aspects of Landor’s verse, are not represented in this book. The Hellenics, though uneven in quality – as which long poems are not? – demand to be read together and in their own context. Like nearly all his poetry, they repay reading by the kind of reader who can find for himself those passages where word is matched with word, the imagery blossoms and the note of this most individual of poets is struck, for five, ten or fifteen lines at a time.

  So what, in the end, becomes of Landor’s evaluation of his poetry versus his prose? In modern jargon, he asserted his professionalism in the latter while confessing to being an amateur in the former. The truth, I believe, is that as a prose writer he suffered from the financial independence which gave him leisure to write. He never had to meet a deadline, or write to a prescribed length, or deal with a specific subject on a realistic scale. A little of the discipline of the market might have done him good. But the disciplines of poetry are quite other. They include the consistent practice of verse, day after day, the exploitation of classic forms and the exploration of new ones, and an assured command of imagery and diction, so that thought and expression are one. On all these counts Landor qualifies.

  He had an aversion to the sonnet-form, and wrote only one, translated from Alfieri, unless the blank verse poem which I have put at the head of this selection can be counted as a a sonnet of sorts.

  He seems to have invented the very short poem in blank verse. He had noticed, in his essay on The Poems of Catullus, the occasional irruptions of blank verse in Milton’s prose, and from 1824 onwards he occasionally introduced such fragments into his own prose, printing them as verse, and sometimes, but not always, presenting them as quotations. From this it is a short step to the autonomous poem, of which I give several examples. Two of these do not even contain a main verb. In this he anticipates the Imagists and Ezra Pound, and he was more immediately followed by Tennyson in such poems as ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’. It is instructive to compare Tennyson’s Oenone of 1832 with Landor’s treatment of the same material in Corythos, first published in Latin in 1815 and in English versions in 1847 and 1859, the English iambics clearly from the same workshop as Gebir of 1798. The verse of Browning, with whom he had a closer relationship, is colloquial and clotted, bustling and boisterous, and sometimes, like Landor’s, dense and elliptical. The physicality of imagery which he shares with Landor is probably due more to similarity or temperament than to literary influence. The poem ‘My guest! I have not led you’ on page 53 could almost be by Browning.

  Another poet whose verse, like Landor’s, changed but little once he had found his voice, is Thomas Hardy. ‘A Private Man on Public Men’ recalls Landor: markedly in the sentiment, less markedly in the texture of the verse. Gautier’s ‘Dernier Voeu’ (Voilà longtemps que je vous aime) reads like a translation
from Landor, and reminds us that Pound bracketed him with Gautier as exemplars of ‘hardness’. There are echoes of Landor, too, in such poets as Housman and Gogarty, and it is easy to see why. But this game, in the end, is a sterile one and hardly worth playing. ‘I claim no place in the world of letters; I am alone, and will be alone, as long as I live, and after.’ Those who admire Landor do not much resemble him, nor do they try to. His own statements about himself, whether as prose-writer or poet, resemble that of Sibelius when he said that whereas other composers offered the public various kinds of cocktail, he was offering a draught of pure water. It is, perhaps, an acquired taste. The aim of this selection is to help a few more readers to acquire it.

  I wish to thank John Myles Dillon and Seamus Heaney for their help and encouragement, and especially to thank Susan Shaw and Phil Cleaver for the care they have taken with the design and printing of this book.

  1

  PROEM

  Come back, ye wandering Muses, come back home,

  Ye seem to have forgotten where it lies:

  Come, let us walk upon the silent sands

  Of Simöis, where deep footmarks show long strides;

  Thence we may mount perhaps to higher ground,

  Where Aphroditè from Athenè won

  The golden apple, and from Herè too,

  And happy Ares shouted far below.

  Or would ye rather choose the grassy vale

  Where flows Anapos thro anemones,

  Hyacynths, and narcissuses, that bend

  To show their rival beauty in the stream?

  Bring with you each her lyre, and each in turn

  Temper a graver with a lighter song.

  POEMS PUBLISHED BEFORE

  1837

  2

  Ah what avails the sceptred race,