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 
Now I know why I continue to use “Dear” even on e-mail messages. I thought it was just an old habit, but now I know I really mean it. And I can add “Friend” or another word if I forget the name as I often do. It keeps the message sweet and intimate.
A bit of pathos that I think has escaped comment so far:
“To these, when I have written, and besought
Remembrance of me…”
The speaker wants something from his friends — remembrance — that he’s having trouble offering them himself. Is there a conventional phrase at the back of this? All I can think of is “Remember me to your family.” Maybe that’s it. But I feel behind it the stronger, darker wish: Remember me when I am dead.
ahwebber, what you say here to me seems congruent with Kent Dickson’s post about the deeply _social_ element in Landor’s poem. The note he wants to write to the long-ago friend whose name escapes him beseeches rememberance– “Remember me”– and what you say leads me to feel, yes, remembrance of me after the grave is also, implicitly, beseeched. As you say, “a bit of pathos” . . . beautifully managed.
Yes, well observed: it was probably Kent Dickson’s comment that put me on that track.
btw I never know how WordPress is going to log me in–but I always hope to be recognized (remembered?) as Alice.
OK, Alice!
The metaphor of oblivion as a stream carrying away treasured memories as well as unwanted ones is quite exquisite, especially with the notion of all “withering on the strand.” The great difficulty of writing about aging without becoming trite or hackneyed makes this poem that much more poignant.
Yes, Emily! Landor will also have had in mind the river Lethe (precisely
“oblivion”) over which the newly dead passed to the Greek underworld.
Another Landor poem I love– two lines long:
On Love, on Grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing.
oh yes! it’s in “Singing School”
Ah. You’re finding an idea, not the reality. What the poet here is saying, is cognition reflects experience. Sometimes one forgets the love or pain evoked by a person, “remembering only the name,” but when least expected the shining form comes back, and the feeling is revived. I think.
oh, that’s interesting! Kind of the opposite of what I was thinking… let me try a paraphrase: –Memory has left with me that name alone: “All that remains to me of Memory is the name ‘Memory'”
–Harmonious name, which other bards may sing: “while other poets are able to suitably sing of Memory [and it is a “harmonious name!]”
–But her bright image in my darkest hour / Comes back: “And yet, when I am at my most befuddled [“dark” would seem to have an intellectual sense in this reading], I get flashes of recollection”
–in vain comes back, called or uncalled. “but to no purpose; sometimes when I’m trying to remember something and sometimes just out of the blue.”
Is that something like what you/re reading, skypegryphon? It seems to work.
But why “in vain comes back”? (I’m now noticing the repetition of “comes back” … following after the much less conspicuous repetition of “left,” with differing syntax, in lines 2 and 6)
Good gloss. /because what he loves is already lost.
“because what he loves is already lost”: Then it is about Ianthe?
Don’t over-think it.
No. “That name” refers to Memory herself – the author forgets even what (who) Memory is, but then he remembers, and it’s this inconstancy which is heartwrenching. Just an interpretation.
(this is to ahwebber)
Interesting, skypegryphon. I wondered about that, but couldn’t make it work. It makes such a difference if there’s one person who is so intensely beloved that her name *doesn’t* get lost, or if that thought is not there, and it’s Memory itself (Herself) that shines through “in vain … called or uncalled.”
Both heartbreaking and beautiful. Thanks for bringing attention to this poem.
Can someone help me with lines 6-9?
“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.”
“That name”: Must be Ianthe? And, if we don’t know all about Ianthe, we easily fill in whatever Immortal Beloved may apply in this poet’s case? But then what’s the force of “other bards may sing”? “In vain comes back”–that works as a reference to unrequited love. The name is retained, so this image isn’t “in vain” in the sense of failing to evoke a name. Or does “in vain” mean that the beloved’s image is vivid, but doesn’t inspire a poem??
There seems to be a complicated tension here between Homer’s Muse, who is invoked when a feat of accuracy is about to be attempted (e.g. the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad), and the modern muse, who inspires through love but may not provide content–as here, where the Muses “shake my shoulder, urging me to sing.” I need to interpret the lines above before I’ll think I can see how it works. But the stranded “Dear–” must be central, the love that remains even when the details are gone. It puts me in mind of my paternal grandmother: it was only in the last of her 106 years that she sometimes didn’t seem to know exactly who I was, but she always knew she loved me. I remember her once, on the edge of sleep, murmuring, “Yes.. you’re my special… my special…”
I just dusted off my Kleine Pauly and learned that Ianthe appears also in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as one of Persephone’s playmates in the meadow where Hades entices her with a beautiful narcissus flower and carries her off to his kingdom of death.