Saturday 30 January 2021

Landor, amaranth and daffodils

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It’s Walter Savage Landor’s 246th birthday. 

I came across him first quoted in the enchanting play and book 84 Charing Cross Road. My favourite sentence in English literature is still this. 

"There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodope ! that are not soon mute, however tuneful : there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last."
It made me read the Imaginary Conversations or some of them. 

I was sorry when I went up to Cambridge to find nobody had heard of Landor, he who threw his cook out of a first floor window into the garden below and then said,

"Oh God I forgot the daffodils."

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