Ianthe! You are Call’d to Cross the Sea

By Walter Savage Landor 1775–1864

Ianthe! you are call’d to cross the sea!

A path forbidden me!

Remember, while the Sun his blessing sheds

Upon the mountain-heads,

How often we have watcht him laying down

His brow, and dropt our own

Against each other’s, and how faint and short

And sliding the support!

What will succeed it now? Mine is unblest,

Ianthe! nor will rest

But on the very thought that swells with pain.

O bid me hope again!

O give me back what Earth, what (without you)

Not Heaven itself can do—

One of the golden days that we have past,

And let it be my last!

Or else the gift would be, however sweet,

Fragile and incomplete.

Biography

As a poet, Walter Savage Landor has enjoyed a permanent minority reputation for the classicism of his epigrams and idyls. He was a seriously emulative classicist and wrote a significant proportion of his poetry in Latin, which was also the original language of some of the long and short poems that he published in English. Indeed, he was deterred from making it his chief medium only by the example of John Milton and the advice of . . .

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