"How disappointment tracks the steps of hope"
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Hope, in Landon’s line, isn’t a beam of light so much as a moving target with a shadow. “Tracks the steps” turns disappointment into something predatory and intimate: not a random storm cloud, but a follower with patience and a good memory. The phrasing suggests inevitability without melodrama. Disappointment doesn’t interrupt hope; it keeps pace with it, reading its route like footprints in wet ground.
That’s a particularly Landon move. Writing as “L.E.L.” in a literary culture that commodified female feeling, she made lyric intimacy look effortless while quietly exposing its costs. The line can be read as a miniature of the romantic economy her audience consumed: desire, anticipation, the sweet ache of longing, then the predictable recoil. If hope is the socially sanctioned emotion - aspirational, uplifting, marketable - disappointment is the private invoice that arrives afterward. Landon compresses that transaction into six words.
The subtext also carries gendered pressure. For a woman poet in the early 19th century, hope is never purely personal; it’s attached to scripts about love, virtue, reputation, security. To hope is to step forward into visibility, and visibility invites judgment. Disappointment “tracking” those steps hints at surveillance: the world follows, measures, corrects.
What makes the line work is its restraint. No exclamation, no moral. Just a clean metaphor that feels true because it refuses catharsis. Hope keeps walking anyway, and disappointment keeps following - which is another way of saying the heart is brave, but not naive.
That’s a particularly Landon move. Writing as “L.E.L.” in a literary culture that commodified female feeling, she made lyric intimacy look effortless while quietly exposing its costs. The line can be read as a miniature of the romantic economy her audience consumed: desire, anticipation, the sweet ache of longing, then the predictable recoil. If hope is the socially sanctioned emotion - aspirational, uplifting, marketable - disappointment is the private invoice that arrives afterward. Landon compresses that transaction into six words.
The subtext also carries gendered pressure. For a woman poet in the early 19th century, hope is never purely personal; it’s attached to scripts about love, virtue, reputation, security. To hope is to step forward into visibility, and visibility invites judgment. Disappointment “tracking” those steps hints at surveillance: the world follows, measures, corrects.
What makes the line work is its restraint. No exclamation, no moral. Just a clean metaphor that feels true because it refuses catharsis. Hope keeps walking anyway, and disappointment keeps following - which is another way of saying the heart is brave, but not naive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Hope |
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