Captain Cook (To My Brother) — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Captain Cook (To My Brother)
The poems
What you need to know
Captain Cook (To My Brother) by Letitia Elizabeth Landon (c.1820): a sister reminds her brother of the childhood games they played after reading Captain Cook's Voyages, in a garden that has since been destroyed.
Landon's closeness to her brother and Cook's voyages and death, the long rhyming couplets and the turn to loss, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Do you recall the fancies of many years ago', 'Ah! we both of us are alter'd', 'We liv'd again its pages, we were its chiefs and kings', 'For weeks he was our idol, we sail'd with him at sea', 'And the pond amid the willows the ocean seem'd to be', 'We call'd the South Sea islands, each flower a different isle', 'We leave in leaving childhood, life's fairy land behind', 'cut down the lime-tree bower', 'The life that cometh after dwells in a darker shade', 'How much we lov'd his dangers, and how we mourn'd his fall'.
Form: thirty-two lines of long rhyming couplets addressed to her brother, with a question to open, exclamations ('Ah!') and the shared 'we' of two siblings.
Structure: the childhood reading and the garden games, a turn at 'We leave in leaving childhood', the garden ploughed and cut down, and a final couplet in which Cook's name still brings it back.
Context: Landon (1802 to 1838), who wrote as L.E.L., was close to her younger brother Whittington and dedicated this 'poetical illustration' to him in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book (1838) in memory of their childhood adventures (the anthology dates it about 1820); Captain James Cook's voyages to the Pacific and his death in Hawaii in 1779.
Compares well with I Remember, I Remember (a lost childhood garden, with laburnums in both), Clear and Gentle Stream (returning to a childhood place) and The Émigrée (a bright memory of a place that has been lost).
