Well I Remember -- Walter Savage Landor

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul

(Poem #1821) Well I Remember Well I remember how you smiled To see me write your name upon The soft sea-sand-'O! what a child! You think you're writing upon stone!' I have since written what no tide Shall ever wash away, what men Unborn shall read o'er ocean wide And find Ianthe's name again. -- Walter Savage Landor

Yesterday's Spenser made me think of this other version of the 'not marble,
nor the gilded monuments' theme. (Milosz writes: "It's hard to guess where
that pride of poets comes from"). What I like about Landor is how quickly he
cuts to the chase - this is not some lengthy meditation on art and
immortality, this is the poem as an act of schoolboy vanity, the very
arrogance of the claim founded in a deep insecurity, in the memory of being
laughed at, of not being taken seriously.

It is also, a more intensely personal poem, more intimate and somehow more
pathetic. Plus I love the sequence of thought that connects 'no tide shall
ever wash away' to 'read o'er ocean wide'. This is not, in my view, a great
poem, but it is an interesting take on an age old theme.

Aseem.

P.S. A note on the text. The text (and title) here comes from bartleby. My
edition of the Penguin Book of English Verse titles this poem Ianthe (which
is misleading, I think, because Landor has a number of poems with that
title) and has a slightly different text:

 WELL I remember how you smiled
   To see me write your name upon
 The soft sea-sand...'O! what a child!
   You think you're writing upon stone!'
 I have since written what no tide
   Shall ever wash away, what men
 Unborn shall read o'er ocean wide
   And find Ianthe's name agen.

On His Seventy-fifth Birthday -- Walter Savage Landor

(Poem #10) On His Seventy-fifth Birthday I strove with none, for none was worth my strife; Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of Life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart. -- Walter Savage Landor

Alternatively titled 'Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher', and one of
Landor's best known works. Landor has written a number of short,
epigrammatic poems, of which this is my favourite - for some other nice
examples see <[broken link] http://utl1.library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/rp/authors/landor.html>
I don't care too much for his longer poems, though - they lack the
concentrated beauty of the short ones, and tend to lose me early on.

Biographical Note:
  Educated at Rugby School and at the University of Oxford, both of which he
  left after disagreement with school officials, Landor spent a lifetime
  quarreling with his father, neighbours, wife, and any authorities at hand
  who offended him. [casts a particularly ironic light on the poem - m.]
  Paradoxically, though, he won the friendship of literary men from Robert
  Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Lamb among the Romantics to
  Charles Dickens and Robert Browning. A proficient classicist from boyhood,
  he wrote many of his English works originally in Latin. He wrote lyrics,
  plays, and heroic poems, but Imaginary Conversations, 2 vol. (1824; vol.
  3, 1828; and thereafter sporadically to 1853), was his great work.

  Of writers who might be called surviving classicists, the most notable is
  Walter Savage Landor, whose detached, lapidary style is seen at its
  best in some brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary
  Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.

                        -- Encyclopaedia Britannica

And finally, a second opinion:

  Walter Savage Landor

  Upon the work of Walter Landor
  I am unfit to write with candor.
  If you can read it, well and good;
  But as for me, I never could.
          -- Dorothy Parker

m.