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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF R. L. STEVENSON compiles the diverse entirety of Stevenson's poetry, showcasing a range of themes from the existential musings of life's transience to the vivid imagery of nature's splendor. Written in an array of styles'—from lyricism to ballads'—Stevenson's poetic voice is distinguished by its melodic quality and rich symbolism. Set against the backdrop of the late Victorian literary scene, his work reflects the era's exploration of personal identity and emotional depth, firmly situating his verse not only as a celebration of language but also as a poignant reflection on the human experience. Robert Louis Stevenson, best known for classics like 'Treasure Island' and 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', was also a prolific poet whose work often drew from his own tumultuous life experiences, including travel, illness, and the complexity of human relationships. His eclectic upbringing in Edinburgh and extensive travels profoundly influenced his worldview, enriching his poetry with a sense of adventure, nostalgia, and philosophical inquiry. This collection is an essential read for both longtime admirers of Stevenson and newcomers alike, offering a glimpse into the heart and soul of a literary giant. It invites readers to explore the depth of his imagination while allowing them to reflect on their own lives through the universal themes he so eloquently captures. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF R. L. STEVENSON
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection presents the complete poetical works of Robert Louis Stevenson, gathering in one place the full span of his verse. Known widely for fiction and essays, Stevenson was also a dedicated poet whose lines accompany his travels, friendships, and domestic life. The purpose of this volume is to offer the entire poetic record as a continuous experience, allowing readers to follow his voice across changing places and seasons. By reading broadly rather than in isolated selections, one meets a writer whose lyric, narrative, and occasional poems together reveal a coherent vision of courage, fellowship, play, and patient endurance.
The scope includes his principal volumes and distinct sequences alongside shorter occasional pieces. Readers will encounter the narrative reach of Ballads, the intimate domestic and imaginative world of A Child’s Garden of Verses, the English and Scots experiments of Underwoods, and the traveling cadences of Songs of Travel. Alongside these stand songs, epistles, tributes, and memorials, from The Vagabond to addresses such as To Kalakaua and To Princess Kaiulani, and reflective island pieces like The House of Tembinoka. The arrangement reveals the breadth of Stevenson’s concerns, ranging from childhood to seafaring vistas, from Edinburgh streets to Pacific horizons.
Within these covers are multiple poetic kinds: narrative ballads; songs and lyrics; children’s verse; occasional and dedicatory poems; verse epistles to friends and collaborators; meditative and elegiac pieces; and exercises in fixed forms. Readers will find rondels, a burlesque sonnet, and classical alcaics, alongside looser song-measures and ballad stanzas. Underwoods contributes English poems and poems in Scots, while other sections explore descriptive landscape, character sketch, and travel hymn. The variety of forms is not mere display; each choice of measure serves mood and subject, whether playful, ceremonious, or grave, and shows Stevenson’s practical mastery of rhythm, refrain, and the art of address.
Unifying themes course through this diversity. Travel appears not as restlessness alone but as vocation: a testing of spirit and a search for comradeship and home. Childhood becomes an abiding imaginative standard, where play and wonder continue into adult ethics. Love, marriage, friendship, and literary fellowship are honored in direct addresses and epistles. Encounters with illness and mortality prompt stoic cheer rather than despair, turning hardship into a discipline of gratitude. Nature, weather, and the sea set moral and emotional registers. Throughout, Stevenson returns to loyalty and hospitality, finding in them the true counters to exile, fatigue, and worldly contingency.
Stylistically, Stevenson favors clarity, musical phrasing, and the speaking voice. His diction is seldom ornate; it relies on cadence, refrain, and precise image to carry feeling. He can be colloquial without slackness, ceremonious without pomp. The ballad line serves narrative impulse, while stricter forms reveal his tact in handling constraint. Scots idiom lends local color and comic or tender nuance in the Underwoods pieces, complementing the clean line of his English lyrics. Direct address—often to a person, place, or craft—keeps the poems social and dramatic, inviting a listener rather than soliloquizing. The result is poetry hospitable to memory and song.
As a whole, the poems remain significant because they complete our picture of Stevenson’s art. They show a temperament often described in his prose—brave, companionable, humorous—singing in its native measures. A Child’s Garden of Verses continues to be cherished for its faithful rendering of a child’s inward life. The travel songs and island poems widen the map of late nineteenth-century English-language verse, registering global encounters with curiosity and tact. The epistles preserve a literary friendship culture in relaxed yet shapely tones. Taken together, the collection offers an ethical and aesthetic poise that still speaks to readers across ages and geographies.
Geography is central to the collection’s imaginative reach. Scotland and Edinburgh appear in local portraits and affectionate homage, while European and American scenes surface in descriptive and reflective pieces. The Pacific writings engage Hawaiian royalty and other island leaders, and observe landscapes, weather, and social customs with attention rather than exoticism. Poems such as The House of Tembinoka, To Kalakaua, and To Princess Kaiulani exemplify respectful address and the duties of guest and host. River names, sea winds, and tropical rains become instruments of tone, shaping meditations on belonging, stewardship, and exchange. Stevenson’s worldliness is anchored by courtesy, curiosity, and gratitude.
Read across the span, the poems sketch a life-course from youthful experiment to mature assurance. Early narrative energies and exercises in form grow into a supple lyric voice capable of tenderness, satire, elegy, and prayer. Domestic pieces respond to marriage and household continuity, while later island poems testify to a settled but outward-looking mind. Throughout, the poet’s craft keeps pace with experience, adapting measure and mood to circumstance. The continuity is audible in his recurring pace and in the composure he brings to trial and celebration alike. The collection thus functions not only as an archive but as a life in verse.
The epistolary and dedicatory poems illuminate Stevenson’s social world. Addresses to friends, collaborators, benefactors, and fellow writers—To S. C., the epistles to Charles Baxter and Albert Dew-Smith, and tributes such as In Memoriam E. H.—record gratitude, counsel, and affectionate raillery. They also display his skill at framing personal occasions in public forms, balancing intimacy with measure. Where the ballads travel outward, these poems knit an inward network of loyalty. Moments of wit, playful mock-heroic, and learned jest—signaled in titles like A Lytle Jape of Tusherie—show a writer who valued levity and tact as moral as well as stylistic virtues.
Formal craftsmanship underpins the collection’s lasting appeal. The rondels demonstrate an ear for repetition and closure; the burlesque sonnet plays with convention while respecting its hinge; the alcaics situate English lyric within classical cadence. Ballad metres drive narrative clarity, while lighter song-forms carry refrain and catch. Even in occasional verse, the workmanship is exact: stanzaic plans are clean, enjambments purposeful, and sounds fitted to sense. The result is a body of work at once accessible and technically alert. Readers may enter for melody and leave having traced the subtle architecture that holds feeling and thought in disciplined equilibrium.
The narrative strain in Ballads keeps faith with oral tradition, using incident, character, and refrain to make memory portable. Yet Stevenson’s ballads avoid mere antiquarianism; they treat motif as living matter, arranging it for contemporary readers without blunting its edge. In parallel, Songs of Travel and related pieces build a persona of the wayfarer whose courage is ordinary and whose freedoms are hard won. The children’s poems bring narrative into the household and the garden, making epic out of play. Across these modes, story and song work in concert, carrying moral insight lightly, moving by rhythm as much as by argument.
Taken together, the complete poetical works invite a steady, companionable reading. They move from nursery to quayside, from city closes to reef and rain, from letter to public ode, yet keep one tone of humane candor. Here is an art that values hospitality, memory, and measured cheer, sustained by craft that does not call attention to itself. The collection enables readers to see continuity in variety: the vagabond spirit joined to the claims of hearth, the private vow made in public measure. It restores poetry to the center of Stevenson’s achievement and offers songs fit for both travel and home.
Author Biography
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and travel writer whose vivid narratives shaped late Victorian and popular modern literature. Best known for Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, and A Child’s Garden of Verses, he combined brisk storytelling with psychological nuance and moral inquiry. His prose bridged romance and realism, influencing adventure fiction, horror, and the short story. Restless, frequently ill, and widely traveled, he wrote across forms—essays, tales, history, and memoir—refining an international English that remains admired for clarity and rhythm. He stands today as a central figure in the global canon of narrative art.
Born in Edinburgh into a family associated with lighthouse engineering, Stevenson grew up amid Calvinist traditions and the intellectual climate of Scotland. He attended the University of Edinburgh, first studying engineering before turning to law; he qualified for the bar but did not practise, choosing literature instead. Early essay writing trained his style, and travel on the Continent broadened his outlook. Literary friendships in London and Edinburgh, including editors and critics who encouraged his experiments, helped him find a readership. He drew on Scottish history and folklore, the romance of Sir Walter Scott, and French essayists, developing a voice at once colloquial, exact, and reflective.
Stevenson’s first sustained successes came through travel and personal essays. An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes depicted modest journeys with an eye for landscape, character, and the ethics of wandering. Virginibus Puerisque gathered essays on style and conduct, while New Arabian Nights showcased urban tales with a playful, ironic edge. Periods in France, Switzerland, and the United States, prompted by health and personal commitments, supplied material for The Silverado Squatters and other sketches. By the early 1880s he had an audience for his lucid prose and inventive forms, positioning him for the narrative breakthroughs that soon followed.
Treasure Island, first serialized and then published in book form in the early 1880s, established Stevenson as a master of adventure. Its brisk plotting, nautical idiom, and morally complex characters helped define later pirate fiction. He deepened his range with A Child’s Garden of Verses, poems attentive to childhood perception and play, and with Kidnapped, a Scottish historical novel alive to landscape, dialect, and loyalty. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a taut novella of divided self and urban anxiety, entered cultural shorthand almost immediately. Reviewers praised his economy and atmosphere, and readers across age groups embraced his stories.
Through the later 1880s and early 1890s, Stevenson sustained a remarkable pace. The Black Arrow and The Master of Ballantrae returned to romance and rivalry; shorter fictions like The Beach of Falesá probed colonial encounters. He collaborated with his stepson on comic and maritime novels, including The Wrong Box, The Wrecker, and The Ebb-Tide. Seeking health and stability, he settled in Samoa, where he wrote South Seas essays and A Footnote to History, engaging publicly with local politics and imperial administration. In the Pacific he was known as “Tusitala,” teller of tales, and his house became a meeting place for travelers and neighbors.
Stevenson wrote often about art and conduct, arguing for the dignity of narrative “romance” alongside realism. Essays such as On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature and A Humble Remonstrance articulate a craft ethic: clear rhythmical prose, purposeful structure, and delight in storytelling. His fiction tests conscience, courage, and the costs of choice, reflecting a mind shaped by Scottish moral thought yet skeptical of rigid dogma. He admired stoic resilience and valued play, qualities visible from children’s verse to seafaring sagas. In Samoa, his public writings defended due process and local autonomy, linking his literary sensibility to practical, civic concerns.
Despite chronic illness, Stevenson’s Samoan years were productive, yielding tales, essays, and revised editions of earlier work. He died suddenly in the mid-1890s at his home near Apia and was interred on a nearby summit, a resting place associated with his brief “Requiem.” His reputation has shifted from mere entertainer to artist of high craft and ethical imagination. Treasure Island helped codify the modern adventure novel; Jekyll and Hyde continues to shape thinking about identity and responsibility; the Scottish novels inform national memory; the South Seas writings invite postcolonial study. His prose remains widely read, taught, adapted, and debated.
Historical Context
Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetical oeuvre emerged within the late Victorian world (1850–1894), a period of rapid industrial growth, imperial expansion, religious questioning, and flourishing print culture. His major poetry books—A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), Underwoods (1887), Ballads (1890), and the posthumous Songs of Travel (1896, edited by Sidney Colvin)—span domestic lyric, Scots vernacular, narrative ballad, and itinerant song. The poems converse with the same historical forces that shaped his prose: steamships, railways, global migration, mass literacy, magazine culture, and the widening British and American literary marketplaces. Across this shifting landscape, Stevenson fashioned a cosmopolitan voice that could speak from Edinburgh drawing rooms to Pacific beaches, testing tradition against modern mobility.
Stevenson’s childhood in Edinburgh, born 13 November 1850 at 8 Howard Place, unfolded within a dynasty of lighthouse engineers—grandfather Robert Stevenson, father Thomas Stevenson, and uncle Alan Stevenson—whose work on the Scottish coasts (Skerryvore completed 1844) linked him imaginatively to seas, storms, and beacons. That maritime inheritance informs nautical and coastwise atmospheres detectable across the poems, from evocations of keepers and harbours to the disciplined regularity of technical labour. Edinburgh, affectionately “Auld Reekie,” supplied a civic and moral backdrop of Presbyterian restraint and Enlightenment afterglow. The city’s granite respectability, its closes and wynds, and its view east to lighthouses and the German Ocean fed a lifelong dialectic of home and horizon.
Educated at the University of Edinburgh, Stevenson abandoned engineering for law (admitted to the Scottish bar in 1875) but gravitated to letters through the periodical world binding Edinburgh and London. Friendships with W. E. Henley (1849–1903), Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, and, crucially, Sidney Colvin situated him in the dynamic ecology of Victorian journalism—Saturday Review, The Academy, Longman’s Magazine, and later the Scots Observer. Underwoods reflects this milieu: poems in English and Scots, epistles to fellow writers and patrons, and formal experiments sharpened by club talk and editorial culture. The professional critic and the poet met in coffeehouses and editorial rooms where proofs, gossip, and aesthetic programmes circulated with unusual speed.
European travel in the 1870s—canoeing in Belgium and France for An Inland Voyage (1876) and walking the Cévennes in 1878—brought Stevenson into living contact with French verse traditions. His rondels and fixed forms respond to the Parnassian discipline of Théodore de Banville and to the medieval verve of François Villon, then fashionable among Anglophone aesthetes. Exposure to French journals, café recitations, and Parisian debates about form and art-for-art’s-sake equipped him with techniques later naturalized into English and Scots idioms. The formal snap of his rondeaux and the musicality of Songs of Travel sit within this trans-Channel exchange, where prosodic curiosity joined continental wandering and a cultivated taste for measure and restraint.
Chronic lung disease—hemorrhages and probable tuberculosis—forced Stevenson into an itinerant regimen of therapeutic climates. He wintered at Davos Platz (1880–81), lived at Hyères (1883–84), and, after his marriage, at Skerryvore, Bournemouth (1884–87), before decamping to Saranac Lake, New York (1887–88). The poise and compression of many lyrics reflect sickroom discipline and the ethics of convalescence. A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) transforms invalid childhood—nurse Alison Cunningham in 17 Heriot Row, toy theatres, shadow-plays—into a modern domestic classic. Addresses to physicians and friends, including To Dr. Hake (Thomas Gordon Hake, poet-physician), belong to a culture in which health, faith, and friendship formed a pragmatic trinity of survival and style.
The 1879 Atlantic crossing to New York and the arduous overland journey to California inserted Stevenson into the Gilded Age’s restless geography of railroads and rivers. He married the American divorcée Fanny Osbourne in San Francisco in 1880, gaining kinship ties on the Pacific Rim. Dedications and epistles from the 1880s acknowledge American friendships and artistic circles, including the painters Virgil M. Williams (1830–1886) and Dora Norton Williams. Place-names like the Susquehannah and the Delaware, familiar from East Coast itineraries and the cartography of transcontinental travel, surface with a pilgrim’s relish. His poems move with the new speed of Pullman cars and steam packets, bearing letters, newsprint, and songs between continents.
The late nineteenth-century ballad revival—shaped by Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques (1765) and Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98)—offered Stevenson a venerable narrative vehicle. Ballads (1890) folds Highland legend and Polynesian story into a shared oral frame, validating both as serious material amid the era’s ethnographic appetite. The form’s refrain and incremental repetition matched Victorian tastes for performance and memory while dignifying communal histories under pressure from modernity. In Stevenson’s hands, the ballad became a portable theatre where clan loyalties, voyages, feasts, and famines conversed with oceanic dynasties and atolls, vaulting from Edinburgh hearths to Pacific marae without disowning cadence, moral testing, or the drumbeat of fate.
Songs of Travel, assembled by Sidney Colvin in 1896, distills a long-formed persona: the wayfarer who marries stoic cheer to laconic self-knowledge. It aligns Stevenson with the nineteenth-century cult of the tramp—kin to Thoreau’s walker and Whitman’s pathfinder—yet remains British in its compact diction and wary humour. Steam and rail shrank distances; pedestrian societies, cycling clubs, and Baedeker handbooks refigured itinerancy as democratic adventure. Stevenson’s “vagabond” quarrels amiably with duty, love, and weather, inheriting the older Romantic pilgrimage but cleansed of grandiosity. The volume registers an age learning to travel light—economically, emotionally, and metrically—while keeping faith with companionable songs, roadside ethics, and a mapmaker’s eye for contour.
From 1888, Pacific voyages recast Stevenson’s life and verse. He chartered the schooner Casco from San Francisco (1888), cruised aboard the Equator (1889) and Janet Nicoll (1890), and finally settled at Vailima, near Apia, Upolu, Samoa (1890–94). The poems greet island sovereignties and courts—King Kalākaua in Honolulu; Princess Kaʻiulani during the political tensions of the early 1890s; and Tem Binoka (Tembinoka) of Abemama in the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati). Tropical meteorology—sudden deluges, reef light, and trade winds—enters his imagery with ethnographic attention. Dedications and songs act as gifts within Pacific protocols of hospitality, marking a European writer’s apprenticeship to oceanic polities at a moment of intensified imperial scrutiny.
Samoa’s civil conflicts and the 1889 Berlin Act, by which Germany, Britain, and the United States attempted to stabilize the islands, made politics immediate. Stevenson’s A Footnote to History (1892) sided with local dignity against external misrule; the poems often treat governance and honour obliquely through praise, lament, and gift-giving. His celebrated open letter defending Father Damien (1890) and respect for Mother Marianne Cope of Kalaupapa, Molokaʻi, register a Victorian humanitarian conscience sharpened by colonial encounter. Within this ethical climate, verses addressed to rulers, missionaries, and friends balance courtesy with candour, investing lyric with civic obligation. The Pacific experience widened his moral map, binding personal address to public justice.
Underwoods, with its English and Scots halves, participates in the nineteenth-century Scots-language revival that followed Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. The Education (Scotland) Act 1872 expanded literacy, while magazines and public recitations nourished dialect pride. Stevenson’s Scots pieces prize idiom as culture, not curiosity, and his epistles—To Charles Baxter (Edinburgh lawyer and confidant), To S. R. Crockett (Galloway novelist)—stage the sociability of letters in a small, argumentative nation. The verse’s intimacy mirrors a country where law, kirk, and press overlapped in clubs and parlours. By alternating registers, Stevenson asserts a bilingual patrimony and a portable citizenship fit for movement from the Canongate to California and Samoa.
Victorian classical education encouraged composition in antique metres; Stevenson’s Alcaics to Horatio F. Brown, the Venetian historian of Life on the Lagoons (1884), shows a cosmopolitan classicist mingling with Adriatic humanists. He also toys with burlesque sonnets and playful “tusherie” in Scots, gesturing toward a fin-de-siècle self-consciousness about genre. London and Edinburgh salons valued such virtuosity: Tennyson had essayed classical measures; Oxford and Cambridge cultivated Greek and Latin prosody as marks of polish. Stevenson’s formal range—rondel, alcaic, epistle—acknowledges that Victorian poetry was both a public art and a gentlemanly sport. Yet his best measures keep the road-dust in them, resisting mere ornament for cadence that carries lived weather.
The poems negotiate the Victorian crisis of faith that followed Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and the challenge of Higher Criticism. Raised amid Scottish Presbyterian debates, Stevenson keeps an ethical temper while declining dogmatic closure. If This Were Faith and related lyrics rehearse provisional belief: fidelity to kindness, courage, and work rather than to settled creeds. The era’s pluralism—Anglican broad churchmen, dissenters, agnostics, and Roman Catholics—pressed writers to articulate conscience without sectarian narrowness. Stevenson’s hymnal cadences, evening prayers, and evensongs suggest a lay liturgy for travellers and invalids, a religion of conduct and companionship that could speak on a steamship deck, in a sickroom, or under palm fronds.
A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) belongs to a cultural elevation of childhood, visible in the art of Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott, and in pedagogical reforms after the 1870 Elementary Education Act in England. Stevenson internalized the nursery as a stage where imagination civilizes constraint: toy soldiers, picture-books, shadows, and the geography of bed and window. The nurse Alison Cunningham (“Cummy”) anchors this domestic devotion, connecting Calvinist lullaby to modern tenderness. Urban childhood in Edinburgh’s New Town, with its regulated squares and dim stairwells, informs the poems’ measured wonder. The volume helped reorient late-Victorian taste toward the serious child, treating play and reverie as generators of moral style.
Late-Victorian technology democratized letters: W. H. Smith’s railway bookstalls, cheap series, and international copyright conventions carried poems far beyond salons. Stevenson’s family trade in lighthouses and fog signals sharpened his respect for utilitarian genius. The Consecration of Braille, honouring Louis Braille’s system (standardized internationally by the Paris congress of 1878, later adapted in Britain and America), aligns with philanthropic institutions that made reading possible for the blind. Such themes of access and signal—beacons in storms, raised dots under fingers—recur as metaphors of guidance in darkness. The Lightkeeper and related pieces pay tribute to anonymous custodians who translate peril into passage, a civic art akin to poetry’s.
Stevenson’s comic and satiric flair reflects the fin-de-siècle’s play with masks and genres. Of His Pitiable Transformation inevitably converses with the cultural afterlife of his 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—Victorian anxieties about divided selves, respectability, and urban night. Burlesque sonnets, familiar epistles, and a “lytle jape of tusherie” exploit parodic registers cherished by a readership attuned to pastiche. Exchanges with Henry James crystallized a debate on romance versus realism; Stevenson’s The Lesson of the Master nods—title and tone—to Jamesian criticism while defending his own ethical romance. Across these pieces, humour becomes diagnostic, testing how lightly a serious age can carry its conscience.
Stevenson died at Vailima, Upolu, on 3 December 1894 and was buried on Mount Vaea, his Requiem carved with the ocean in earshot. Posthumous editing by Sidney Colvin brought Songs of Travel (1896) to readers, while Fanny Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne safeguarded the manuscripts that mapped a global career. The poems remember Edinburgh and lighthouse craft, honour friends from London clubs and San Francisco studios, and salute Pacific sovereigns and missionaries amid the pressures of the Berlin Act world. Taken together, they are itinerant letters, ballads, and prayers composed under Victorian skies yet open to the trade winds—a portable commonwealth of forms shaped by travel, illness, and fellowship.
Synopsis (Selection)
Ballads
Narrative poems that recast Scottish and Polynesian legends in swift, stark balladry, tracing fatal choices, clan loyalties, and the hard price of courage across rugged and island settings.
A Child’s Garden of Verses
A cycle of children’s lyrics that renders play, illness, bedtime, and daydreaming from a child’s point of view, turning domestic scenes into realms of imagination.
Underwoods
A two-part collection in English and Scots that offers intimate addresses, moral reflections, and portraits of Edinburgh and its folk, blending affectionate satire with elegy and craft.
Songs of Travel (incl. The Vagabond; Youth and Love I–II; We Have Loved of Yore; If This Were Faith; Evensong; An End of Travel)
A loose sequence on wandering, love, and mortality in which the speaker embraces the open road, weighs devotion against freedom, and contemplates the quiet of journey’s end.
Pacific Island Poems and Addresses (To an Island Princess; To Kalakaua; To Princess Kaiulani; To Mother Maryanne; The House of Tembinoka; Tropic Rain; The Fine Pacific Islands)
Occasional and narrative verses from Stevenson’s Pacific years that salute local rulers and friends, evoke tropical weather and custom, and meditate on power, hospitality, and cultural encounter.
Epistles and Dedications (To Dr. Hake; To ——; To the Muse; To S.R. Crockett; A Familiar Epistle; Epistle to Charles Baxter; Epistle to Albert DeW-Smith; To My Old Familiars; To S. C.; To Virgil and Dora Williams; To My Wife)
Verse letters and tributes to friends, patrons, and personified inspirations, mixing playful self-portraiture with gratitude, counsel, and literary camaraderie.
Love and Family Lyrics (Mater Triumphans; My Wife)
Short celebratory pieces of domestic affection, exalting motherhood and marital devotion with plainspoken warmth and resolve.
Scots Tunes and City Sketches (To the Tune of Wandering Willie; Auld Reekie; A Lytle Jape of Tusherie)
Poems in Scots voice and tradition that echo street songs and portray Edinburgh’s character, by turns affectionate, ribald, and nostalgic.
Nature, Work, and Weather Lyrics (Winter; The Woodman; The Lightkeeper; The Song; Song)
Concise vignettes of season and labor that fix on a craftsman’s duty and the austerity or solace of landscape, from snowbound quiet to a lighthouse’s vigilant watch.
Memorials and Tributes (In Memoriam E.H.; The Lesson of the Master; The Consecration of Braille)
Occasional pieces that commemorate the departed and honor discipline and humane invention, from a private elegy to tributes to artistic mastery and the gift of literacy.
American River Sketch (The Susquehannah and the Delaware)
A brief travel portrait contrasting two sister rivers of the northeastern United States, noting their differing moods and scenes.
Metrical and Humorous Experiments (Rondels; Alcaics to Horatio F. Brown; Burlesque Sonnet; Of His Pitiable Transformation)
Light-handed exercises in fixed and classical forms that showcase technical play, parody, and mock-heroic transformation.
THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF R. L. STEVENSON
BALLADS
THE SONG OF RAHÉRO: A LEGEND OF TAHITI
TO ORI A ORI
Ori, my brother in the island mode, In every tongue and meaning much my friend, This story of your country and your clan, In your loved house, your too much honoured guest, I made in English. Take it, being done; And let me sign it with the name you gave.
TERIITERA.
I
THE SLAYING OF TÁMATÉA
It fell in the days of old, as the men of Taiárapu tell, A youth went forth to the fishing, and fortune favoured him well. Támatéa his name: gullible, simple, and kind. Comely of countenance, nimble of body, empty of mind, His mother ruled him and loved him beyond the wont of a wife, Serving the lad for eyes and living herself in his life. Alone from the sea and the fishing came Támatéa the fair, Urging his boat to the beach, and the mother awaited him there. — “Long may you live!” said she. “Your fishing has sped to a wish. And now let us choose for the king the fairest of all your fish. For fear inhabits the palace and grudging grows in the land, Marked is the sluggardly foot and marked the niggardly hand, The hours and the miles are counted, the tributes numbered and weighed, And woe to him that comes short, and woe to him that delayed!”
So spoke on the beach the mother, and counselled the wiser thing. For Rahéro stirred in the country and secretly mined the king. Nor were the signals wanting of how the leaven wrought, In the cords of obedience loosed and the tributes grudgingly brought. And when last to the temple of Oro the boat with the victim sped, And the priest uncovered the basket and looked on the face of the dead, Trembling fell upon all at sight of an ominous thing, For there was the aito dead, and he of the house of the king. So spake on the beach the mother, matter worthy of note, And wattled a basket well, and chose a fish from the boat; And Támatéa the pliable shouldered the basket and went, And travelled, and sang as he travelled, a lad that was well content. Still the way of his going was round by the roaring coast, Where the ring of the reef is broke and the trades run riot the most. On his left, with smoke as of battle, the billows battered the land; Unscalable, turreted mountains rose on the inner hand. And cape, and village, and river, and vale, and mountain above, Each had a name in the land for men to remember and love; And never the name of a place, but lo! a song in its praise: Ancient and unforgotten, songs of the earlier days That the elders taught to the young, and at night, in the full of the moon, Garlanded boys and maidens sang together in tune.
Támatéa the placable went with a lingering foot; He sang as loud as a bird, he whistled hoarse as a flute; He broiled in the sun, he breathed in the grateful shadow of trees, In the icy stream of the rivers he waded over the knees; And still in his empty mind crowded, a thousandfold, The deeds of the strong and the songs of the cunning heroes of old. And now was he come to a place Taiárapu honoured the most, Where a silent valley of woods debouched on the noisy coast, Spewing a level river. There was a haunt of Pai. There, in his potent youth, when his parents drove him to die, Honoura lived like a beast, lacking the lamp and the fire, Washed by the rains of the trade and clotting his hair in the mire; And there, so mighty his hands, he bent the tree to his foot — So keen the spur of his hunger, he plucked it naked of fruit. There, as she pondered the clouds for the shadow of coming ills, Ahupu, the woman of song, walked on high on the hills. Of these was Rahéro sprung, a man of a godly race; And inherited cunning of spirit, and beauty of body and face. Of yore in his youth, as an aito, Rahéro wandered the land, Delighting maids with his tongue, smiting men with his hand. Famous he was in his youth; but before the midst of his life Paused, and fashioned a song of farewell to glory and strife.
House of mine (it went), house upon the sea,Belov’d of all my fathers, more belov’d by me!Vale of the strong Honoura, deep ravine of Pai,Again in your woody summits I hear the trade-wind cry.House of mine, in your walls, strong sounds the sea[1q],Of all sounds on earth, dearest sound to me.I have heard the applause of men, I have heard it arise and die:Sweeter now in my house I hear the trade-wind cry. These were the words of his singing, other the thought of his heart; For secret desire of glory vexed him, dwelling apart. Lazy and crafty he was, and loved to lie in the sun, And loved the cackle of talk and the true word uttered in fun; Lazy he was, his roof was ragged, his table was lean, And the fish swam safe in his sea, and he gathered the near and the green. He sat in his house and laughed, but he loathed the king of the land, And he uttered the grudging word under the covering hand. Treason spread from his door; and he looked for a day to come, A day of the crowding people, a day of the summoning drum, When the vote should be taken, the king be driven forth in disgrace, And Rahéro, the laughing and lazy, sit and rule in his place. Here Támatéa came, and beheld the house on the brook; And Rahéro was there by the way and covered an oven to cook.
Naked he was to the loins, but the tattoo covered the lack, And the sun and the shadow of palms dappled his muscular back. Swiftly he lifted his head at the fall of the coming feet, And the water sprang in his mouth with a sudden desire of meat: For he marked the basket carried, covered from flies and the sun; And Rahéro buried his fire, but the meat in his house was done. Forth he stepped; and took, and delayed the boy, by the hand; And vaunted the joys of meat and the ancient ways of the land: — “Our sires of old in Taiárapu, they that created the race, Ate ever with eager hand, nor regarded season or place, Ate in the boat at the oar, on the way afoot; and at night Arose in the midst of dreams to rummage the house for a bite. It is good for the youth in his turn to follow the way of the sire; And behold how fitting the time! for here do I cover my fire.” — “I see the fire for the cooking, but never the meat to cook,” Said Támatéa.— “Tut!” said Rahéro. “Here in the brook, And there in the tumbling sea, the fishes are thick as flies, Hungry like healthy men, and like pigs for savour and size: Crayfish crowding the river, sea-fish thronging the sea.” — “Well, it may be,” says the other, “and yet be nothing to me. Fain would I eat, but alas! I have needful matter in hand, Since I carry my tribute of fish to the jealous king of the land.”
Now at the word a light sprang in Rahéro’s eyes. “I will gain me a dinner,” thought he, “and lend the king a surprise.” And he took the lad by the arm, as they stood by the side of the track, And smiled, and rallied, and flattered, and pushed him forward and back. It was “You that sing like a bird, I never have heard you sing,” And “The lads when I was a lad were none so feared of a king. And of what account is an hour, when the heart is empty of guile? But come, and sit in the house and laugh with the women awhile; And I will but drop my hook, and behold! the dinner made.” So Támatéa the pliable hung up his fish in the shade On a tree by the side of the way; and Rahéro carried him in, Smiling as smiles the fowler when flutters the bird to the gin, And chose him a shining hook, and viewed it with sedulous eye, And breathed and burnished it well on the brawn of his naked thigh, And set a mat for the gull, and bade him be merry and bide, Like a man concerned for his guest, and the fishing, and nothing beside. Now when Rahéro was forth, he paused and hearkened, and heard The gull jest in the house and the women laugh at his word;
And stealthily crossed to the side of the way, to the shady place Where the basket hung on a mango; and craft transfigured his face. Deftly he opened the basket, and took of the fat of the fish, The cut of kings and chieftains, enough for a goodly dish. This he wrapped in a leaf, set on the fire to cook, And buried; and next the marred remains of the tribute he took, And doubled and packed them well, and covered the basket close. — “There is a buffet, my king,” quoth he, “and a nauseous dose!” — And hung the basket again in the shade, in a cloud of flies; — “And there is a sauce to your dinner, king of the crafty eyes!” Soon as the oven was open, the fish smelt excellent good. In the shade, by the house of Rahéro, down they sat to their food, And cleared the leaves, in silence, or uttered a jest and laughed And raising the cocoanut bowls, buried their faces and quaffed. But chiefly in silence they ate; and soon as the meal was done, Rahéro feigned to remember and measured the hour by the sun And “Támatéa,” quoth he, “it is time to be jogging, my lad.” So Támatéa arose, doing ever the thing he was bade, And carelessly shouldered the basket, and kindly saluted his host; And again the way of his going was round by the roaring coast.
Long he went; and at length was aware of a pleasant green, And the stems and shadows of palms, and roofs of lodges between. There sate, in the door of his palace, the king on a kingly seat, And aitos stood armed around, and the yottowas sat at his feet. But fear was a worm in his heart: fear darted his eyes; And he probed men’s faces for treasons and pondered their speech for lies. To him came Támatéa, the basket slung in his hand, And paid him the due obeisance standing as vassals stand. In silence hearkened the king, and closed the eyes in his face, Harbouring odious thoughts and the baseless fears of the base; In silence accepted the gift and sent the giver away. So Támatéa departed, turning his back on the day. And lo! as the king sat brooding, a rumour rose in the crowd; The yottowas nudged and whispered, the commons murmured aloud; Tittering fell upon all at sight of the impudent thing, At the sight of a gift unroyal flung in the face of a king. And the face of the king turned white and red with anger and shame In their midst; and the heart in his body was water and then was flame; Till of a sudden, turning, he gripped an aito hard, A youth that stood with his ómare, one of the daily guard, And spat in his ear a command, and pointed and uttered a name, And hid in the shade of the house his impotent anger and shame.
Now Támatéa the fool was far on his homeward way, The rising night in his face, behind him the dying day. Rahéro saw him go by, and the heart of Rahéro was glad, Devising shame to the king and nowise harm to the lad; And all that dwelt by the way saw and saluted him well, For he had the face of a friend and the news of the town to tell; And pleased with the notice of folk, and pleased that his journey was done, Támatéa drew homeward, turning his back to the sun. And now was the hour of the bath in Taiárapu: far and near The lovely laughter of bathers rose and delighted his ear. Night massed in the valleys; the sun on the mountain coast Struck, endlong; and above the clouds embattled their host, And glowed and gloomed on the heights; and the heads of the palms were gems, And far to the rising eve extended the shade of their stems; And the shadow of Támatéa hovered already at home. And sudden the sound of one coming and running light as the foam Struck on his ear; and he turned, and lo! a man on his track, Girded and armed with an ómare, following hard at his back. At a bound the man was upon him; — and, or ever a word was said, The loaded end of the ómare fell and laid him dead.
II
THE VENGING OF TÁMATÉA
Thus was Rahéro’s treason; thus and no further it sped. The king sat safe in his place and a kindly fool was dead. But the mother of Támatéa arose with death in her eyes. All night long, and the next, Taiárapu rang with her cries. As when a babe in the wood turns with a chill of doubt And perceives nor home, nor friends, for the trees have closed her about, The mountain rings and her breast is torn with the voice of despair: So the lion-like woman idly wearied the air For a while, and pierced men’s hearing in vain, and wounded their hearts. But as when the weather changes at sea, in dangerous parts, And sudden the hurricane wrack unrolls up the front of the sky, At once the ship lies idle, the sails hang silent on high, The breath of the wind that blew is blown out like the flame of a lamp, And the silent armies of death draw near with inaudible tramp: So sudden, the voice of her weeping ceased; in silence she rose And passed from the house of her sorrow, a woman clothed with repose, Carrying death in her breast and sharpening death in her hand. Hither she went and thither in all the coasts of the land. They tell that she feared not to slumber alone, in the dead of night, In accursed places; beheld, unblenched, the ribbon of light
Spin from temple to temple; guided the perilous skiff, Abhorred not the paths of the mountain and trod the verge of the cliff; From end to end of the island, thought not the distance long, But forth from king to king carried the tale of her wrong. To king after king, as they sat in the palace door, she came, Claiming kinship, declaiming verses, naming her name And the names of all of her fathers; and still, with a heart on the rack, Jested to capture a hearing and laughed when they jested back; So would deceive them a while, and change and return in a breath, And on all the men of Vaiau imprecate instant death; And tempt her kings — for Vaiau was a rich and prosperous land, And flatter — for who would attempt it but warriors mighty of hand? And change in a breath again and rise in a strain of song, Invoking the beaten drums, beholding the fall of the strong, Calling the fowls of the air to come and feast on the dead. And they held the chin in silence, and heard her, and shook the head; For they knew the men of Taiárapu famous in battle and feast, Marvellous eaters and smiters: the men of Vaiau not least. To the land of the Námunu-úra, to Paea, at length she came, To men who were foes to the Tevas and hated their race and name. There was she well received, and spoke with Hiopa the king. And Hiopa listened, and weighed, and wisely considered the thing.
“Here in the back of the isle we dwell in a sheltered place,” Quoth he to the woman, “in quiet, a weak and peaceable race. But far in the teeth of the wind lofty Taiárapu lies; Strong blows the wind of the trade on its seaward face, and cries Aloud in the top of arduous mountains, and utters its song In green continuous forests. Strong is the wind, and strong And fruitful and hardy the race, famous in battle and feast, Marvellous eaters and smiters: the men of Vaiau not least. Now hearken to me, my daughter, and hear a word of the wise: How a strength goes linked with a weakness, two by two, like the eyes[2q]. They can wield the ómare well and cast the javelin far; Yet are they greedy and weak as the swine and the children are. Plant we, then, here at Paea a garden of excellent fruits; Plant we bananas and kava and taro, the king of roots; Let the pigs in Paea be tapu and no man fish for a year; And of all the meat in Tahiti gather we threefold here. So shall the fame of our plenty fill the island and so, At last, on the tongue of rumour, go where we wish it to go. Then shall the pigs of Taiárapu raise their snouts in the air; But we sit quiet and wait, as the fowler sits by the snare, And tranquilly fold our hands, till the pigs come nosing the food: But meanwhile build us a house of Trotéa, the stubborn wood,
Bind it with incombustible thongs, set a roof to the room, Too strong for the hands of a man to dissever or fire to consume; And there, when the pigs come trotting, there shall the feast be spread, There shall the eye of the morn enlighten the feasters dead. So be it done; for I have a heart that pities your state, And Nateva and Námunu-úra are fire and water for hate.” All was done as he said, and the gardens prospered; and now The fame of their plenty went out, and word of it came to Vaiau. For the men of Námunu-úra sailed, to the windward far, Lay in the offing by south where the towns of the Tevas are, And cast overboard of their plenty; and lo! at the Tevas’ feet The surf on all the beaches tumbled treasures of meat. In the salt of the sea, a harvest tossed with the refluent foam; And the children gleaned it in playing, and ate and carried it home; And the elders stared and debated, and wondered and passed the jest, But whenever a guest came by eagerly questioned the guest; And little by little, from one to another, the word went round: “In all the borders of Paea the victual rots on the ground, And swine are plenty as rats. And now, when they fare to the sea, The men of the Námunu-úra glean from under the tree And load the canoe to the gunwale with all that is toothsome to eat; And all day long on the sea the jaws are crushing the meat,
