[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 <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.

From: "Ryan" <evedder@>

Landor has defenitely set a benchmark in modern philosphy.  You cant
find cadour like this since the time of Socrates and Plato.

From: ha91a@  Fri Dec 19 14:04:38 2003

I thought of submitting "I strove with none" and was browsing through
the site. Seems like it has already been posted, It's a short but
profoundly meaningful and a beautiful poem. I couldn't quite get what
the poet meant by "it sinks". Of course everyone has their own
interpretation but could anyone share any thoughts on that.

-h

From: "Russell" <puersenex@>

The text you present  is a bit garbled.  The Oxford Book of English
Verse (1955) has  a full stop in l.1 after "strife." In l.3 "warmed"
appears as "warm'd." Most important,  because the meaning is changed,
in l.2 the comma falls after "and," not before.

Best wishes,--


                               Puer Senex