I strove with none
4 lines · about a minute to read aloud
Walter Savage Landor · 1849
Free to use in the UK and the US
I strove with none
Walter Savage Landor · 1849
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.
Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection, Walter Savage Landor. Project Gutenberg eBook #21628, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/21628/pg21628.txt, printed as number XXV and untitled. Commonly carried elsewhere as 'Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher', which is a later editorial title and not Landor's.
Public domain in the UK and the US · serany.app
What Serany thinks about this poem
Background
Landor wrote it for his seventy-fourth birthday in 1849 and lived another fifteen years, which he would have found funny. He was in fact famously quarrelsome, sued often and exiled himself to Italy after a libel case, so the first line is a better description of how he wanted to be remembered than of how he lived.
Meaning
Four lines, and a whole life accounted for. He did not pick fights. He loved the natural world first and made things second. He got everything out of being alive that there was to get, which is what warming both hands at the fire means. Now it has burned down and he is ready to go. No regret and no complaint.
Who's it for
This is the one to read when you want four lines and nothing more. It suits a person who reached a good age, kept out of other people's arguments, and would have hated a long service: a reader can deliver it in twenty seconds without their voice going. It carries no religion at all. It does not fit a death that came too early, because every line of it assumes a full life was had.
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