Poems of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) in The Juvenile Forget Me Not, 1833/The Grandmother
The Grandmother.
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THE GRANDMOTHER.
What care they that the winter-wind
Is driving over the heath,
With a sky of murky clouds above,
And the drifted snow beneath?
The day and its labour alike are done,
And the fire is burning bright;
And that old dame hath tale and song
Wherewith to while the night.
They are happy beside that lowly hearth;
For by her love to that child,
That aged woman, 'mid care and grief,
To existence is reconciled.
His father lived as a sailor lives,
To and fro on the stormy wave;
But the wind arose one fearful night,
And the sea was the tall ship's grave.
Tidings came of the vessel's loss,
And his young wife pined away;—
She had known but a flower's fragile life,
And she had a flower's decay.
But their mother thinks not now of the dead,
Nor of her long despair;
For her heart is full of the joy of life,
And the boy who is seated there.
His brow is glad, and his eyes are clear,
And she sees in him revived
The buoyant mirth of those early years
Which she has herself survived.
He is as her youth returned again—
A hope bequeathed by the past;
And affection but rivets a tenderer bond,
Because that bond is its last.
L. E. L.