Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) is a giant of English poetry, if the word “giant” is taken in a certain specialized sense. He was, in truth, a man out of time: an 18th-century classicist, come too late to be a peer of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Samuel Johnson (1709–1784); a 19th-century political firebrand, come too soon to foment the revolutions he desired. He never quite fit in, and his work was unreinforced by poetic followers and underappreciated by the public. He could not be a Romantic like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and he could not be a Victorian like Tennyson and Browning. The age kept his gigantic talent constrained, leaving Landor, yes, a giant — but only a very small giant — of literature.One sign of his stature is that poets have always appreciated him more than ordinary readers. Landor preached violence in his political prose, unable to stomach the emerging industrial age. Or, in truth, unable even to understand the new order, which left him flailing in political writings that have not aged well. In his poetry, however, he responded to the remaking of England by finding refuge in a deeply classical verse: typically, short poems in tetrameter on grief and the old virtues, written with a classically serene tone. “Rose Aylmer” is a good example, perhaps his best known poem. Or the epigrams “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher” and the simply perfect quatrain “Dirce.”Or today’s Poem of the Day, “Mild is the Parting Year.” A New Year’s poem, it looks back at lost time (as does the most popular New Year’s poem, Robert Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne”). But Landor’s verses turn toward one particular loss. New Year’s Eve is a time for sorrow, and one person in particular he mourns — the person, lost in death, who “would have soothed” his melancholy away.Mild is the Parting Yearby Walter Savage LandorMild is the parting year, and sweet The odour of the falling spray; Life passes on more rudely fleet, And balmless is its closing day. I wait its close, I court its gloom, But mourn that never must there fall Or on my breast or on my tomb The tear that would have soothed it all.___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
