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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson presents a comprehensive collection of the Scottish author's poetic works, showcasing his distinctive blend of lyrical beauty and thematic depth. Stevenson's poetry, often characterized by its musicality, explores a wide range of subjects, including nature, childhood, and the complexities of human emotions. This collection encompasses both his light-hearted verses and more contemplative pieces, reflecting the breadth of his literary talents and his engagement with the Victorian landscape, which sought to reconcile Romantic ideals with a burgeoning realism. Through innovative forms and vivid imagery, Stevenson invites readers into a world where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, resonating with both nostalgia and introspection. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a novelist, poet, and travel writer whose works have left an indelible mark on English literature. Born in Edinburgh, his experiences with illness and his extensive travels throughout Europe and the Pacific shaped his worldview, evident in the emotional resonance of his poetry. Stevenson's ability to transcend personal hardships is mirrored in his poems, which reflect a quest for beauty and meaning amidst the challenges of life, giving a voice to the vulnerabilities that define the human experience. I wholeheartedly recommend The Complete Poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson to anyone seeking a profound exploration of the poetic form. This collection not only provides an essential understanding of Stevenson's literary contributions but also serves as an invitation to appreciate the richness of emotion and imagination contained within his verses. Whether you are a long-time admirer of Stevenson or new to his work, this volume is a treasure trove of thought-provoking poetry that promises to engage and inspire. 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: 2024
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The Complete Poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume presents the complete poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson, bringing together the full range of his verse from across a life spent between Scotland, Europe, and the Pacific. It gathers poems published in discrete books during his lifetime, poems later assembled after his death, and numerous occasional pieces addressed to friends, places, and public figures. By unifying these strands, the collection allows readers to trace a coherent poetic career: early experiments, mature achievements, and late, far‑ranging meditations. Its purpose is both archival and interpretive, offering a single, reliable space in which Stevenson’s lyric, narrative, and occasional voices can be read in dialogue with one another.
The contents here are poems only. They encompass a broad spectrum of poetic forms: narrative ballads; children’s verses; travel songs and lyrics; epistles cast in verse; elegies and commemorations; classical experiments; French forms such as rondels; dialect pieces; playful burlesques; and brief songs or motto‑like stanzas. Some poems function as dedications or letters in rhyme, while others unfold as miniature stories or portraits. No prose works are included; readers seeking Stevenson’s novels, tales, essays, or private correspondence will find them elsewhere. Within the poetic sphere, however, the collection is comprehensive, attentive to the diversity of meters, modes, and occasions that mark his career.
Although renowned for fiction and essays, Stevenson considered verse a central instrument of expression, returning to it at every stage of his writing life. The poems collected here span intimate domestic settings, urban and rural Scotland, continental journeys, and long Pacific sojourns. Read chronologically or by affinity, they reveal an arc: from youthful play and clarity of address, through experiments in voice and form, to reflective late poems shaped by travel and distance. Some volumes appeared while he lived; others were gathered and issued afterward, attesting to the steady presence of poetry in his work and to its enduring reception.
A persistent theme is travel as both outward motion and inward discipline. The road, the sea, and the open air recur with emblematic force, celebrating freedom while acknowledging limits and responsibilities. Landscapes are felt through weather, light, and work—storms, winter brightness, woodcraft, and the craft of navigation. The lyric persona often embraces a self‑chosen austerity, testing cheerfulness against hardship. In these poems, restlessness becomes an ethic as much as a mood, the pleasures of movement balanced against the calls of friendship, duty, and home. The result is a poetics that makes journeying a way to think about character and fate.
Equally distinctive is his attentiveness to childhood and the imagination. Verses shaped for and about the young prize clarity, musicality, and the vividness of play. They attend to the textures of rooms, gardens, toys, and solitary fancies, treating small adventures with seriousness and grace. Without sentimentality, they honor a child’s perspective as a complete world, one that adults revisit through memory and sympathy. Their language remains limpid and rhythmic, designed for reading aloud and for delight in sound. These pieces have long drawn readers of different ages, illustrating Stevenson’s ability to fashion poems that are welcoming yet finely made.
Stevenson’s private affections appear in poems addressed to his wife and to intimates, where love and companionship are examined with candor and restraint. He writes of courtship, loyalty, and shared trials with a tone at once conversational and carefully measured. Rather than grandiose declarations, these poems tend to explore the daily negotiations of care: patience, humor, and steadiness in the face of illness, travel, or uncertainty. The sequences devoted to youth and love consider desire alongside fidelity, charting the passage from longing to partnership. Through such work, his lyric becomes a record of character formed through relation.
Friendship is another binding thread. Numerous poems are epistles in verse—warm, witty, sometimes admonitory—addressed to fellow writers, artists, and confidants. These pieces offer glimpses of collegial debate, literary homage, and affectionate teasing, extending the sociable traditions of occasional poetry. Classical and contemporary names appear, not as ornaments but as part of an active conversation that crosses places and generations. In these addresses, Stevenson joins private feeling to public art, making the poem serve as greeting, tribute, and sometimes counsel. The result is a portrait of a cosmopolitan network and of poetry as a living medium of friendship.
The Scottish imagination remains foundational throughout. City and countryside are evoked with economy: the reek and rigor of an old capital, the steadiness of trades and seasons, the paternal figure of the woodman, the bracing clarity of winter. In dialect pieces and standard English alike, Stevenson draws on ballad habits, proverbial turns, and a local stoicism tempered by humor. These poems observe work and weather with respect, treating ordinary endurance as a form of heroism. Even when the subject shifts abroad, the measure and moral poise learned in Scottish settings continue to shape his stance and syntax.
Later poems engage the Pacific with curiosity and tact. Addresses to a Hawaiian monarch and a princess, a tribute to a religious worker, portraits of island households, and meditations on ocean life register both admiration and distance. Stevenson is an outsider, attentive to hospitality, ceremony, and the costs of encounter. The poems often balance praise with awareness of change, treating names and places not as exotic scenes but as living communities. Maritime labor, lightkeeping, and the craft of seamanship provide concrete figures for duty and vigilance. These works broaden his range while sustaining his commitment to lucid, respectful description.
Formally, Stevenson’s verse reveals disciplined variety. He uses ballad stanzas for narrative swiftness and songlike catch, tight lyric measures for meditation, and brighter anapestic rhythms for movement and cheer. French forms appear as elegant exercises in concision and refrain; classical meters serve as homage and technical test. He can burlesque a sonnet without abandoning structure, and turn to epistolary couplets for talkative ease. Across modes, he favors clarity of image and cadence over ornament, aiming for lines that carry by sound as much as sense. The prevailing impression is of craft worn lightly, musical and exact.
Taken together, these poems matter for their breadth of human address and their integrity of tone. They join accessibility to mastery, modeling how a poet can speak plainly without reductive simplicity. They complement Stevenson’s prose by revealing the habits behind it: an ear for cadence, a trust in narrative impulse, a preference for moral clarity tested by experience and often by ill health. For modern readers, the collection offers more than period charm. It presents a coherent ethical poetics, attentive to work, play, travel, and affection, and a historical record of a writer moving through changing worlds with steadiness.
Readers may move through the book chronologically, tracing development, or approach it thematically—children and memory, friendship, the road, Scotland, the Pacific, and formal experiment. It also rewards reading aloud, in small groups or alone, listening to how measure steadies feeling and how refrain gathers force. Because many poems began as occasional pieces, context enriches but is not required; the craft supplies orientation. The completeness of this collection allows unexpected correspondences to surface across decades and distances. It invites both first‑time visitors and returning admirers to encounter Stevenson’s verse as a whole, and to follow its clear, generous music.
Author Biography
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and travel writer whose work helped define late Victorian popular and literary culture. Best known for Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped, he moved with unusual ease among genres, from adventure fiction and historical romance to children’s verse and reflective essays. His lucid style, narrative ingenuity, and interest in moral complexity made him a favorite of general readers and an object of critical debate. Across a relatively short life, he produced a remarkably varied body of work that continues to circulate internationally and inspire adaptations.
Raised in Edinburgh in a family connected to lighthouse engineering, Stevenson struggled with recurring illness from childhood, a condition that shaped his education and habit of travel. He attended the University of Edinburgh, first with an eye to engineering and then law, qualifying for the Scottish bar but choosing a literary vocation instead. While still a student and in the years immediately after, he read widely in English and French literature, absorbed romantic and realist traditions, and published essays and sketches in periodicals. Early excursions in Scotland and on the Continent encouraged a lifelong fascination with journeying, landscape, and the ethics of storytelling.
Stevenson’s first sustained successes came as a travel writer and essayist. An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes drew on modest expeditions to craft understated narratives attentive to observation, companionship, and the rhythms of the road. Collections such as Virginibus Puerisque and later essays refined a conversational, self-scrutinizing voice allied to the reflective tradition. He also experimented with short fiction in New Arabian Nights, adapting urban settings and sensational plots to test questions of identity and chance. These early books established his versatility and a method: simple surfaces concealing technical control and probing moral curiosity.
The publication of Treasure Island in the early 1880s brought a breakthrough in fame. Conceived partly from a homemade map, the novel revitalized seafaring adventure for a broad readership and helped codify the popular image of pirates, treasure maps, and mutiny. Its swift pacing, vivid scenes, and layered moral tensions made it appealing to both younger and adult readers. Around the same period he issued A Child’s Garden of Verses, a compact, musically phrased collection that has remained central to children’s poetry in English. Stevenson had by then become a figure equally at home in magazines and in book-length fiction.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published in the mid-1880s, transformed his reputation again, condensing anxieties about respectability, desire, and the divided self into a taut novella. The book quickly entered public discourse as a touchstone for psychological duality. Alongside it, historical adventures such as Kidnapped and its sequel, and the later The Master of Ballantrae, explored loyalty, justice, and the costs of rebellion against richly imagined Scottish backdrops. Critical reception in his lifetime mixed admiration with skepticism about romance as serious art, but the craftsmanship of his plotting and prose drew sustained attention from fellow writers and reviewers.
Chronic ill health prompted extended journeys through Europe, North America, and the Pacific in the late 1880s, culminating in residence in Samoa. Life in the South Seas broadened his subjects and sharpened his political awareness. A Footnote to History offered a pointed critique of imperial entanglements in the islands, while late fiction and tales from the Pacific examined cultural encounter, commerce, and moral compromise. He also collaborated on several novels during this period, further diversifying his output. Even when addressing distant settings, he returned to perennial themes: responsibility, temptation, and the instability of identity under pressure.
Stevenson died unexpectedly in Samoa in the mid-1890s, leaving an unfinished but influential project of storytelling across forms. His reputation fluctuated in the decades that followed, yet has steadily risen as critics have traced his technical innovation and ethical nuance. Today he is read for narrative verve and stylistic clarity; for adventure that probes ambiguity rather than merely celebrating action; and for an essayistic intelligence that illuminates how stories work. His fiction and poems remain staples of education and popular culture, and frequent adaptations attest to the pliancy of his creations and the continuing relevance of his questions.
Historical Context
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) wrote his poetry amid the late-Victorian world of steam, empire, and expanding print culture. His verse moves from Edinburgh parlors to Pacific beaches, tracing a generation’s mobility and anxieties as Britain’s influence peaked. The collection spans nursery songs, Scots dialect, epistles, ballads, and travel lyrics, and thus mirrors contemporary tastes for fixed forms, folklore, and cosmopolitan travel. Industrial modernity, medical science, religious doubt, and comparative anthropology all inflect these poems. The same era that carried him by emigrant train across America and by schooner across the Pacific also made possible his global literary network, to which many occasional addresses are inscribed.
Stevenson’s family trade was lighthouse engineering, a calling that fixed the Stevensons to Scotland’s coasts and the Northern Lighthouse Board. His father, Thomas Stevenson (1818–1887), and earlier Robert Stevenson (1772–1850), built lights that tamed the Firths and skerries. That heritage surfaces whenever sea, hazard, and vigilance enter the verse, and explicitly in pieces like The Lightkeeper. Edinburgh—Auld Reekie—formed his imagination: smoky closes, kirks, and law courts left their impress on poems that remember a city of learning and conscience. The maritime world he inherited, with its charts and beacons, frames both the discipline and the wanderlust that animate this body of poetry.
Educated at the University of Edinburgh and called to the Scottish bar in 1875, Stevenson chose letters over law, but he never abandoned Scots idiom or the moral dialectics of his upbringing. Underwoods brings English and Scots into deliberate conversation, reviving vernacular speech on the printed page. The Scots comic play in pieces such as A Lytle Jape of Tusherie, and city memory in Auld Reekie, speak to a linguistic self-consciousness shared with contemporaries like W. E. Henley and Andrew Lang. This commitment to Scots, alongside standard English lyrics, positions Stevenson within late-century debates over national voice, class address, and the canon.
The Victorian ballad and folklore revival provided a crucial matrix for Stevenson’s BALLADS (1890). Scholars like Francis James Child (publishing 1882–1898) and popularizers such as Lang had turned readers toward oral tradition and heroic narrative. Stevenson’s ballads—drawing on Celtic legend in Heather Ale, clan chronicle in Ticonderoga, and Polynesian narrative in The Song of Rahero—translate living or remembered oral cultures into literate form. They also register anthropology’s rise and the paradox of empire: the appetite to collect the world’s stories while altering the conditions that sustained them. His ballads thus belong to a pan-imperial archive of song, vigorously romantic yet ethnographically attentive.
French influence—prosodic, artistic, and social—runs through Stevenson’s career. Time at Fontainebleau and Grez-sur-Loing placed him among expatriate painters and poets, while nineteenth-century Anglophone formalists like Edmund Gosse and Austin Dobson renewed interest in fixed French forms. Stevenson’s Rondels and playful Burlesque Sonnet show him working within that revival’s constraints, balancing lightness with craft. His experiments with stanza, refrain, and occasional classical imitation—seen again in Alcaics to Horatio F. Brown—align him with a cosmopolitan network in which form signaled taste and sociability. The poems thus document a European conversation about tradition, translation, and the portability of lyric technique.
A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) emerged during the “Golden Age” of English children’s literature, after Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song (1872) and in the wake of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Stevenson’s collection, dedicated to his nurse Alison Cunningham, dignifies a child’s imaginative sovereignty—bedroom voyages, toy theaters, shadow parliaments—within a domestic, urban middle-class milieu. Social reforms and pedagogy had elevated the child as a moral subject; publishers recognized a broad family market. These poems, while intimate, reflect larger debates over play, reading, and the formation of citizens. They sit comfortably beside his adult lyrics, sharing a disciplined musicality and a traveler’s sense of elsewhere.
Stevenson’s chronic lung illness—diagnosed then under elastic terms like “consumption”—situated him in a medical culture of climate cures and sanatoria. Extended stays in Davos (early 1880s), maritime passages, and winterings in temperate refuges shaped both his itinerary and his themes. Poems such as Winter, Evensong, and If This Were Faith register the spiritual introspection and daily discipline of the invalid’s regime: measured walks, controlled atmospheres, and nightly rites. The era’s therapeutics brought poets and physicians into close conversation, and Stevenson’s addresses to medical or elder literary figures, as in To Dr. Hake (Thomas Gordon Hake, 1809–1895), belong to that ethic of care.
London’s clubs, publishers, and periodicals (Cornhill, Longman’s) linked Stevenson to editors, patrons, and friends who surface in his epistles. To S. C. recalls the counsel of Sidney Colvin (1845–1927), who later edited Songs of Travel (1896). Epistle to Charles Baxter honors the Edinburgh solicitor who steadied Stevenson’s finances and drafts; Epistle to Albert Dew-Smith nods toward Cambridge’s inventive technophile circle. Addresses to fellow writers like S. R. Crockett and to elder figures such as Hake place Stevenson within a Victorian habit of sociable verse. Occasion, friendship, and the swift traffic of manuscript and post animate this facet of the collection.
The North Atlantic and American transit of 1879–1880—emigrant steerage to New York, rail “across the plains,” on to Monterey and San Francisco—left durable traces. The Susquehannah and the Delaware distills riverine names from that journey; A Familiar Epistle registers the genial tone of letters sent en route. In California he married Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne (1840–1914) in 1880 and moved among artists including Virgil Macey Williams (director of the San Francisco School of Design) and Dora Williams, whom he salutes in To Virgil and Dora Williams. This westering phase broadened his Atlantic sympathies and prepared the larger Pacific turn.
Domestic life—complex, mobile, collaborative—threads the poems. With Fanny, Stevenson gained a household that included stepchildren Isobel and Lloyd Osbourne; their joint literary projects and peripatetic logistics inflect My Wife and To My Wife with gratitude and irony. The Bournemouth years (1885–1887), at “Skerryvore,” named for a family lighthouse, framed the writing of A Child’s Garden of Verses and many lyrics of convalescence. Mater Triumphans and We Have Loved of Yore, whether literal or emblematic, draw on rituals of kinship in a century that sentimentalized motherhood yet strained families through migration and illness. Elegies like In Memoriam E. H. register the era’s persistent losses.
Stevenson’s poetry stages nineteenth-century struggles over belief: a Calvinist Edinburgh childhood, a skeptical intellectual maturity, and a persistent religious ear attuned to liturgy and hymn. The titles If This Were Faith and Evensong mark that tension; so too the recurrent invocation of The Muse as a power both sustaining and fickle. His generation read Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and the Oxford Movement against rising secular sciences. Stevenson’s poems neither sermonize nor dismiss; they convert itinerancy—literal Songs of Travel—into a spiritual method. The lyric “I” wrestles toward order, often through craft, and accepts the provisionality of conviction in an age of contesting authorities.
Songs of Travel gathers lyrics composed across decades and published posthumously in 1896 under Sidney Colvin’s editorship, epitomizing Stevenson’s roving self-image. The Vagabond, Youth and Love (I–II), An End of Travel, and Tropic Rain mingle European roads with Pacific squalls, celebrating liberty while counting its costs. These poems also intersect with a wider late-Victorian fascination with tramps and wayfarers, from ballad sheets to new social surveys. The sequence’s musical regularity invited later composers—most memorably Ralph Vaughan Williams (1904)—to recast them as art-song, confirming their portable cadence. The series thus stands at the nexus of page, voice, and stage in modern song culture.
Stevenson’s Pacific decade (1888–1894) recalibrated his moral and aesthetic horizons. Chartering the Casco in 1888 out of San Francisco brought him to the Marquesas and Tahiti; the Equator (1889) carried him through the Paumotus, the Gilberts (Kiribati), and the Marshalls; the Janet Nicoll (1890) extended his circuit. Encounters with chiefs and storytellers produced poems like The House of Tembinoka, written on Apemama for King Tembinok’, and Pacific ballads in which genealogy, taboo, and land-rights appear within tight stanzaic forms. The Woodman and Tropic Rain fold environmental observation into ethical reflection, registering the pressures of mission, trade, and colonial administration on island life.
Hawaii offered Stevenson a charged political and spiritual theatre. He visited Honolulu in 1889, during the aftermath of the Bayonet Constitution (1887) that curtailed King David Kalākaua’s authority; the monarch died in 1891. Poems To Kalakaua and To Princess Kaiulani honor the embattled royal house and the exiled heir (Victoria Kaʻiulani, 1875–1899), while To Mother Maryanne praises Sister Marianne Cope (1838–1918), who served persons with Hansen’s disease at Kalaupapa, Molokaʻi, after Father Damien’s death in 1889. These addresses show Stevenson joining a Pacific conversation about sovereignty, charity, and dignity, careful to praise without presuming sovereignty over the stories he relays.
Settled at Vailima on Upolu, Samoa, from 1890, Stevenson wrote within contested colonial terrain, as Germany, Britain, and the United States vied for influence. His prose A Footnote to History (1892) intervened directly; the poems often act obliquely, translating weather, labor, and ritual into lyric. The Fine Pacific Islands balances admiration with unease about the costs of “opening” the archipelagos. Environmental motifs—rainforest clearance implied in The Woodman, deluge in Tropic Rain—gesture toward resource extraction and missionization. Local allegiances were reciprocal: Samoans named him Tusitala (“Teller of Tales”) and cut the Road of the Loving Heart to his grave in 1894.
Even as he ranged globally, Stevenson kept a classical and philanthropic eye on Europe. Alcaics to Horatio F. Brown addresses the Venetian historian who made the lagoons his home; the metric choice asserts continuity with ancient craft. The Consecration of Braille salutes Louis Braille (1809–1852) and the nineteenth century’s democratization of reading, in sympathy with other reform energies he admired. The Lightkeeper recalls disciplined service in perilous conditions, a secular liturgy he knew from family lore. Auld Reekie, To My Old Familiars, and The Lesson of the Master look backward, testing memory and tutelage—whether Jamesian or domestic—against the obligations of the present.
Stevenson died suddenly at Vailima on 3 December 1894 and was buried on Mount Vaea, with his “Requiem” soon widely quoted. Posthumous shaping by Sidney Colvin ensured that scattered lyrics—especially Songs of Travel—entered a public canon. Read together, BALLADS, Underwoods, A Child’s Garden of Verses, and the many occasional and travel poems map a Victorian’s passage from Edinburgh to the world, from Calvinist hearth to plural modernity. Friends and dedicatees—Baxter, Hake, Dew-Smith, Horatio F. Brown, S. R. Crockett, Kalākaua, Kaiulani—index the social circuits that carried poems by mail, schooner, and press. The oeuvre’s historical context is transnational, technologized, and insistently humane.
Synopsis (Selection)
BALLADS
Narrative poems reimagining folklore, history, and adventure—often stark tales of loyalty, treachery, and fate—told in driving rhythms and plain speech. They foreground moral choice under pressure and the costs of courage.
A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES
Short lyrics in a child’s voice that turn rooms, gardens, illness, play, and bedtime into a private imaginative world. They distill domestic life and wonder into clear, musical stanzas.
UNDERWOODS
A two-part miscellany in English and Scots that ranges from love and friendship to mortality and national feeling. It showcases Stevenson's formal variety and a conversational, sometimes dialectal, music.
SONGS OF TRAVEL
Later lyrics of wandering, exile, and seafaring composed across Europe and the Pacific. They balance restlessness with stoic acceptance, celebrating freedom while acknowledging fatigue and fate.
Wanderer and Travel Lyrics (THE VAGABOND; TO THE TUNE OF WANDERING WILLIE; WINTER; THE SUSQUEHANNAH AND THE DELAWARE; AN END OF TRAVEL; EVENSONG)
Compact wanderer anthems and road pieces that praise movement, weather hardship, and find calm at day’s end. They sketch rivers, seasons, and halting places as waymarks in a life of motion.
Love and Marriage Poems (YOUTH AND LOVE — I; YOUTH AND LOVE — II; WE HAVE LOVED OF YORE; IF THIS WERE FAITH; MY WIFE; TO MY WIFE)
Poems of courtship and married devotion that weigh youthful ardor against time, doubt, and tested loyalty. They affirm constancy while probing belief, disenchantment, and renewal.
Pacific and Polynesian Addresses (TO AN ISLAND PRINCESS; TO KALAKAUA; TO PRINCESS KAIULANI; TO MOTHER MARYANNE; THE HOUSE OF TEMBINOKA; THE FINE PACIFIC ISLANDS; TROPIC RAIN)
Occasional verses from Stevenson's South Seas years that salute chiefs and royals, honor caregivers, and praise island beauty and rain. They observe dignity amid colonial upheaval and record hospitality, power, and climate with vivid local detail.
Verse Epistles and Friendships (A FAMILIAR EPISTLE; EPISTLE TO CHARLES BAXTER; EPISTLE TO ALBERT DEW-SMITH; TO S.R. CROCKETT; TO DR. HAKE; TO S. C.; TO VIRGIL AND DORA WILLIAMS)
Informal letters in verse to friends and patrons that trade news, counsel, and affectionate banter across distances. They map a network of literary and personal loyalties from Scotland to the Pacific.
Addresses, Invocations, and Self-Reflections (TO THE MUSE; TO ——; THE LESSON OF THE MASTER)
Brief addresses on vocation and self-command—invocations to inspiration, tactful words to an unnamed addressee, and guidance distilled from experience. They frame poetry as discipline tempered by humility.
Scottish Affections and Portraits (AULD REEKIE; TO MY OLD FAMILIARS)
Sketches of Edinburgh and remembered haunts that capture city atmosphere, habit, and character. They preserve place and past as steady companions amid change.
Portraits of Work and Duty (THE WOODMAN; THE LIGHTKEEPER)
Character studies of solitary, skilled labor that safeguard others and harmonize with nature. They honor vigilance, craft, and the quiet ethics of work.
Memorials and Tributes (IN MEMORIAM E.H.; THE CONSECRATION OF BRAILLE; MATER TRIUMPHANS)
Elegiac and laudatory pieces that grieve a loss, celebrate the liberating invention of Braille, and exalt motherhood. They treat service, memory, and nurture as forms of heroism.
Formal Experiments and Light Verse (RONDELS; OF HIS PITIABLE TRANSFORMATION; ALCAICS TO HORATIO F. BROWN; A LYTLE JAPE OF TUSHERIE; BURLESQUE SONNET)
Playful and technical exercises in fixed and classical forms, dialect jest, and parody. They test measure and tone from high decorum to comic self-mockery.
Short Songs (THE SONG; SONG)
Brief, songlike lyrics that distill emotion and melody to essentials. They serve as interludes of pure voice within the larger sequence.
The Complete Poetry of Robert Louis 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,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[1q], 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[2q]. 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[3q], 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. 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,
