Landor reading Homer in Greek for one last time, in his mid-eighties, sketched by his friend William Wetmore Story
We who are getting older— everyone is, but the term accumulates force with time— have particular reasons to consider Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864). Note those dates. A memorable sketch of him shows him reading Homer, which he decided, since he had lived so long, to read, in the original Greek, one more time.
Landor kept writing into his nineties. In his late seventies he published a book called Last Fruit Off an Old Tree expecting it to be his last. Five years later he published another book, titled Dry Sticks. As those titles suggest, he could be funny about the subject. One poem begins, “The leaves are falling; so am I.”
Landor’s poem “Memory” was teasing in my own memory when, in this Forum a couple of months ago, I introduced Elise Partridge’s poem “Chemo Side Effects: Memory.” Landor was deeply literary, a writer when that word’s meaning included someone who made marks on paper, by hand. That action of applying ink to paper inspires the memorable, heartbreaking moment in his poem. When he sets out to write a letter to a friend, the word “Dear” “hangs on the upper verge,” waiting for the unremembered name. The conventional word of the salutation (in email, largely supplanted by “Hi”) takes on a great charge of feeling: the attachment to the person and the passion to write, momentarily survive the ability to remember the name.
For some contemporary readers may Landor’s language may seem merely old-fashioned, with its lofty, Latinate “vernal” and “autumnal” for spring and fall; personally, I am all the more moved by the formal, somewhat learned language: the implicitly classically trained mind expressing its attachment to the seasons, as to friends, to writing, to the one beloved he remembers best. For that great love of his life, Jane Swift, he invented the name “Ianthe” in his many poems to and about her.
It’s impressive to me that Landor can put that love-ideal in the context of other relationships, including his ability to write, or to remember. Early friendships and more recent ones, he says, are equally vulnerable to oblivion. For me, this nineteenth-century poem by someone who felt old so long ago, gets sharper as the language itself— along with us all— keeps getting older, and changing.
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.
Robert Pinsky Poetry Forum 
I’m on the island of Paros, where iambic pentameter was invented by Archilocus with his deathless “for tis thy friends who make thee choke with rage.” Thank you, Robert, for remembering such fine iambics. I myself lean on “Sweetheart” when the lover’s name becomes unavailable, two-beats that fill that alarming emptiness.
Good to hear from Paros about pentameter. “Sweetheart” . . . “Ianthe” . . . “Stella” . . . “Laura” . . . In other art forms “baby” is the two-syllable filler of choice. (Though names– Maybelline, Lucille) also have their modern tradition.
Good to hear Chuck Berry and Little Richard brought together with Walter Savage Landor. As far as I know, that’s a first. Maybe those two names are so memorable not just because of music–which, I’ve read, links things to some deeper and stronger part of memory–but because the singers are angry with the women involved (no “baby” there): the names become a chant of complaint and, in the case of Little Richard, a scream. Well, nineteenth-century poetry has its pleasures too, and I wanted to thank you for bringing this one up. To me, the most touching part is that phrase “called or uncalled,” which notes that we can’t always control what part of the past may disappear or suddenly grab our attention–whether a beloved name or an old song.
The last four lines alone constitute a memorable poem.
You are right!
What I like about the poem is its sense of social decorum. Lines like “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” invoke, for me at least, social spaces like halls and parlors where the warm though polite and correct rites of Victorian friendship and sociability are played out. The poem itself and its treatment of something so intimate and personal as memory loss sticks to a similar public, slightly distanced register.
Kent, this is a wonderful observation (the right noun for your noticing these “social spaces”)– letters, in the period, were social currency, intensely, I think what you say here fills in for me why I like that little sketch so much: the artist William Wetmore Story and his wife were entertaining the 89-year-old Landor as a house guest. Story saw Landor in the garden (in Fiesole, I think) reading his Greek text of the Iliad, and made the drawing, I’d guess in a few minutes. That _social_ setting you describe: that moment, equivalent of a snapshot, is part of it, as is the letter to someone whose name escapes you for a moment.
Thank you, Kent.
This is a beautiful poem, and Robert’s comment calls attention to the poet’s love and passion for writing as some cause for hope, even as precious friendships are forgotten along the way.
Stephen Scully, I meant my comment above about winter and white paper, and the nymph Ianthe (since located by Bethany W. Pope!) to be a response to you.
Winter– associated with the color of paper, where the word “Dear” hangs on the verge. Stephen, do you know if there is a nymph (as Bethany Pope suggests below) named “Ianthe”? (Landor’s poetic-name for Jane Swift.)
I just found her: IANTHE The Okeanis of “violet flowers” or the colour “violet”. She may have been a Nephele of the violet tinged clouds of dawn, or an Anthousa (flower-nymph) of violets.
She was a (very minor) goddess. http://www.theoi.com/Nymphe/Okeanides.html
I knew my brain was not entirely defunct!
Viva the minor goddess . . . and viva information, too.
One of the words that most delighted me in this poem was vernal, that oblivion and death start in spring. Of the four seasons, the one not named but is in the wings ready to be named is winter.
wonderful!