IF you wanted words to celebrate a love which was cut short by death what better choice could you make than Lakeland’s romantic poet William Wordsworth?

An extract from The Prelude, his most highly-regarded work, is carved in marble on the pedestal of a striking statue of a young woman in Norwich Cathedral.

She was Violet Vaughan Morgan, secretary to the bishop of Norwich who died of Spanish flu on February 22 in 1919 at the age of just 22.

Dozens of people in South Cumbria - we will probably never know just how many - died of the flu pandemic in 1918 and 1919.

It particularly took the lives of children and young adults.

The subject of Violet Morgan's affections – and of several of her poems – was Bishop Bertram Pollock, who lived from 1863 to 1943.

It was expected that they would marry, despite he being 35 years older than her.

The bishop officiated at her burial in Caistor churchyard.

Her memorial was commissioned in 1921 from the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood by Violet’s parents Evelyn and Penry Vaughan Morgan, a newspaper proprietor who lived at The Priory, Puttenham.

Wordsworth’s wording on the statue base is:

I knew a maid, a young enthusiast:

Birds in the bower, and Lambs in the green field

Could they have known her, would have loved; methought

Her very presence such a sweetness breathed,

That flowers & trees and even the silent hills,

And everything she looked on, should have had

An intimation how she bore herself

Towards them, & to all creatures, God delights

In such a being; for her common thoughts

Are pity, her life is gratitude.

The Prelude was started in 1798 when Wordsworth was aged 28 and he continued to work on this semi-biographical work for the rest of his life.

It was not published until three months after his death in 1850.

Wordsworth was born in 1770 and spent his most productive period and later life in Lakeland, being most strongly associated with Dove Cottage at Grasmere.

The Norwich statue also has a verse from one of violet’s own poems:

“No voice shall break the glory of the stillness

“Or touch the joy that our two soul’s fulfills

“And we shall see the splendour of the morning dawn on the hills.”