And the bright face of day, thy dalliance hadst;
Where to thine ear first sang the enraptured birds;
Where love and thou that lasting bargain made.
The ship rides trimmed, and from the eternal shore
Thou hearest airy voices; but not yet
Depart, my soul, not yet a while depart.
Freedom is far, rest far. Thou art with life
Too closely woven, nerve with nerve entwined;
Service still craving service, love for love,
Love for dear love, still suppliant with tears.
Alas, not yet thy human task is done!
A bond at birth is forged; a debt doth lie
Immortal on mortality. It grows —
By vast rebound it grows, unceasing growth;
Gift upon gift, alms upon alms, upreared,
From man, from God, from nature, till the soul
At that so huge indulgence stands amazed.
Leave not, my soul, the unfoughten field, nor leave
Thy debts dishonoured, nor thy place desert
Without due service rendered. For thy life,
Up, spirit, and defend that fort of clay,
Thy body, now beleaguered; whether soon
Or late she fall; whether to-day thy friends
Bewail thee dead, or, after years, a man
Grown old in honour and the friend of peace.
Contend, my soul, for moments and for hours;
Each is with service pregnant; each reclaimed
Is as a kingdom conquered, where to reign.
As when a captain rallies to the fight
His scattered legions, and beats ruin back,
He, on the field, encamps, well pleased in mind.
Yet surely him shall fortune overtake,
Him smite in turn, headlong his ensigns drive;
And that dear land, now safe, to-morrow fall.
But he, unthinking, in the present good
Solely delights, and all the camps rejoice.
XXV
It is not yours, O mother, to complain,
Not, mother, yours to weep,
Though nevermore your son again
Shall to your bosom creep,
Though nevermore again you watch your baby sleep.
Though in the greener paths of earth,
Mother and child, no more
We wander; and no more the birth
Of me whom once you bore
Seems still the brave reward that once it seemed of yore;
Though as all passes, day and night,
The seasons and the years,
From you, O mother, this delight,
This also disappears —
Some profit yet survives of all your pangs and tears.
The child, the seed, the grain of corn,
The acorn on the hill,
Each for some separate end is born
In season fit, and still
Each must in strength arise to work the almighty will.
So from the hearth the children flee,
By that almighty hand
Austerely led; so one by sea
Goes forth, and one by land;
Nor aught of all man’s sons escapes from that command.
So from the sally each obeys
The unseen almighty nod;
So till the ending all their ways
Blindfolded loth have trod:
Nor knew their task at all, but were the tools of God.
And as the fervent smith of yore
Beat out the glowing blade,
Nor wielded in the front of war
The weapons that he made,
But in the tower at home still plied his ringing trade;
So like a sword the son shall roam
On nobler missions sent;
And as the smith remained at home
In peaceful turret pent,
So sits the while at home the mother well content.
XXVI
THE SICK CHILD
CHILD
O Mother, lay your hand on my brow!
O mother, mother, where am I now?
Why is the room so gaunt and great?
Why am I lying awake so late?
MOTHER
Fear not at all: the night is still.
Nothing is here that means you ill —
Nothing but lamps the whole town through,
And never a child awake but you.
CHILD
Mother, mother, speak low in my ear,
Some of the things are so great and near,
Some are so small and far away,
I have a fear that I cannot say.
What have I done, and what do I fear,
And why are you crying, mother dear?
MOTHER
Out in the city, sounds begin,
Thank the kind God, the carts come in!
An hour or two more, and God is so kind,
The day shall be blue in the window-blind,
Then shall my child go sweetly asleep,
And dream of the birds and the hills of sheep.
XXVII
IN MEMORIAM F.A.S.
Yet, O stricken heart, remember, O remember
How of human days he lived the better part.
April came to bloom and never dim December
Breathed its killing chills upon the head or heart.
Doomed to know not Winter, only Spring, a being
Trod the flowery April blithely for a while,
Took his fill of music, joy of thought and seeing,
Came and stayed and went, nor ever ceased to smile.
Came and stayed and went, and now when all is finished,
You alone have crossed the melancholy stream,
Yours the pang, but his, O his, the undiminished
Undecaying gladness, undeparted dream.
All that life contains of torture, toil, and treason,
Shame, dishonour, death, to him were but a name.
Here, a boy, he dwelt through all the singing season,
And ere the day of sorrow departed as he came.
Davos, .
XXVIII
TO MY FATHER
Peace and her huge invasion to these shores
Puts daily home; innumerable sails
Dawn on the far horizon and draw near;
Innumerable loves, uncounted hopes
To our wild coasts, not darkling now, approach:
Not now obscure, since thou and thine are there,
And bright on the lone isle, the foundered reef,
The long, resounding foreland, Pharos stands.
These are thy works, O father, these thy crown;
Whether on high the air be pure, they shine
Along the yellowing sunset, and all night
Among the unnumbered stars of God they shine;
Or whether fogs arise and far and wide
The low sea-level drown — each finds a tongue
And all night long the tolling bell resounds:
So shine, so toll, till night be overpast,
Till the stars vanish, till the sun return,
And in the haven rides the fleet secure.
In the first hour, the seaman in his skiff
Moves through the unmoving bay, to where the town
Its earliest smoke into the air upbreathes,
And the rough hazels climb along the beach.
To the tugged oar the distant echo speaks.
The ship lies resting, where by reef and roost
Thou and thy lights have led her like a child.
This hast thou done, and I — can I be base?
I must arise, O father, and to port
Some lost, complaining seaman pilot home.
XXIX
IN THE STATES
With half a heart I wander here
As from an age gone by
A brother — yet though young in years,
An elder brother, I.
; You speak another tongue than mine,
Though both were English born.
I towards the night of time decline
You mount into the morn.
Youth shall grow great and strong and free,
But age must still decay:
To-morrow for the States, — for me,
England and Yesterday.
San Francisco.
XXX
A PORTRAIT
I am a kind of farthing dip,
Unfriendly to the nose and eyes;
A blue-behinded ape, I skip
Upon the trees of Paradise.
At mankind’s feast, I take my place
In solemn, sanctimonious state,
And have the air of saying grace
While I defile the dinner-plate.
I am “the smiler with the knife,”
The battener upon garbage, I —
Dear Heaven, with such a rancid life
Were it not better far to die?
Yet still, about the human pale,
I love to scamper, love to race,
To swing by my irreverent tail
All over the most holy place;
And when at length, some golden day,
The unfailing sportsman, aiming at,
Shall bag, me — all the world shall say:
Thank God, and there’s an end of that!
XXXI
Sing clearlier, Muse, or evermore be still,
Sing truer or no longer sing!
No more the voice of melancholy Jaques
To wake a weeping echo in the hill;
But as the boy, the pirate of the spring,
From the green elm a living linnet takes,
One natural verse recapture — then be still.
XXXII
A CAMP
The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit;
The air was still, the water ran,
No need was there for maid or man,
When we put up, my ass and I,
At God’s green caravanserai.
XXXIII
THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS
We travelled in the print of olden wars;
Yet all the land was green;
And love we found, and peace,
Where fire and war had been.
They pass and smile, the children of the sword —
No more the sword they wield;
And O, how deep the corn
Along the battlefield!
XXXIV
SKERRYVORE
For love of lovely words, and for the sake
Of those, my kinsmen and my countrymen,
Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled
To plant a star for seamen, where was then
The surfy haunt of seals and cormorants:
I, on the lintel of this cot, inscribe
The name of a strong tower.
XXXV
SKERRYVORE
THE PARALLEL
Here all is sunny, and when the truant gull
Skims the green level of the lawn, his wing
Dispetals roses; here the house is framed
Of kneaded brick and the plumed mountain pine,
Such clay as artists fashion and such wood
As the tree-climbing urchin breaks. But there
Eternal granite hewn from the living isle
And dowelled with brute iron, rears a tower
That from its wet foundation to its crown
Of glittering glass, stands, in the sweep of winds,
Immovable, immortal, eminent.
XXXVI
My house, I say. But hark to the sunny doves
That make my roof the arena of their loves,
That gyre about the gable all day long
And fill the chimneys with their murmurous song:
Our house, they say; and mine, the cat declares
And spreads his golden fleece upon the chairs;
And mine the dog, and rises stiff with wrath
If any alien foot profane the path.
So too the buck that trimmed my terraces,
Our whilome gardener, called the garden his;
Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abode
And his late kingdom, only from the road.
XXXVII
My body which my dungeon is,
And yet my parks and palaces: —
Which is so great that there I go
All the day long to and fro,
And when the night begins to fall
Throw down my bed and sleep, while all
The building hums with wakefulness —
Even as a child of savages
When evening takes her on her way
(She having roamed a summer’s day
Along the mountain-sides and scalp),
Sleeps in an antre of that alp: —
Which is so broad and high that there,
As in the topless fields of air,
My fancy soars like to a kite
And faints in the blue infinite: —
Which is so strong, my strongest throes
And the rough world’s besieging blows
Not break it, and so weak withal,
Death ebbs and flows in its loose wall
As the green sea in fishers’ nets,
And tops its topmost parapets: —
Which is so wholly mine that I
Can wield its whole artillery,
And mine so little, that my soul
Dwells in perpetual control,
And I but think and speak and do
As my dead fathers move me to: —
If this born body of my bones
The beggared soul so barely owns,
What money passed from hand to hand,
What creeping custom of the land,
What deed of author or assign,
Can make a house a thing of mine?
XXXVIII
Say not of me that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,
The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,
To play at home with paper like a child.
But rather say: In the afternoon of time
A strenuous family dusted from its hands
The sand of granite, and beholding far
Along the sounding coast its pyramids
And tall memorials catch the dying sun,
Smiled well content, and to this childish task
Around the fire addressed its evening hours.
BOOK II
IN SCOTS
TABLE OF COMMON SCOTTISH VOWEL SOUNDS
ae
ai } = open A as in rare.
a’
au
aw } = AW as in law.
ea = open E as in mere, but this with exceptions, as heather = heather, wean = wain, lear = lair.
ee
ei
ie } = open E as in mere.
oa = open O as in more.
ou = doubled O as in poor.
ow = OW as in bower.
u = doubled O as in poor.
ui or ü before R = (say roughly) open A as in rare.
ui or ü before any other consonant = (say roughly) close I as in grin.
y = open I as in kite.
i = pretty nearly what you please, much as in English, Heaven guide the reader through that labyrinth! But in Scots it dodges usually from the short I, as in grin, to the open E as in mere. Find and blind, I may remark, are pronounced to rhyme with the preterite of grin.
I
THE MAKER TO POSTERITY
Far ‘yont amang the years to be,
When a’ we think, an’ a’ we see,
An’ a’ we luve, ‘s been dung ajee
By time’s rouch shouther,
An’ what was richt and wrang for me
Lies mangled throu’ther,
It’s possible — it’s hardly mair —
That some ane, ripin’ aft
er lear —
Some auld professor or young heir,
If still there’s either —
May find an’ read me, an’ be sair
Perplexed, puir brither!
“What tongue does your auld bookie speak?”
He’ll speir; an’ I, his mou’ to steik:
“No’ bein’ fit to write in Greek,
I wrote in Lallan,
Dear to my heart as the peat-reek,
Auld as Tantallon.
“Few spak it than, an’ noo there’s nane.
My puir auld sangs lie a’ their lane,
Their sense, that aince was braw an’ plain,
Tint a’thegither,
Like runes upon a standin’ stane
Amang the heather.
“But think not you the brae to speel;
You, tae, maun chow the bitter peel;
For a’ your lear, for a’ your skeel,
Ye’re nane sae lucky;
An’ things are mebbe waur than weel
For you, my buckie.
“The hale concern (baith hens an’ eggs,
Baith books an’ writers, stars an’ clegs)
Noo stachers upon lowsent legs
An’ wears awa’;
The tack o’ mankind, near the dregs,
Rins unco law.
“Your book, that in some braw new tongue
Ye wrote or prentit, preached or sung,
Will still be just a bairn, an’ young
In fame an’ years,
Whan the hale planet’s guts are dung
About your ears;
“An’ you, sair gruppin’ to a spar
Or whammled wi’ some bleezin’ star,
Cryin’ to ken whaur deil ye are,
Hame, France, or Flanders —
Whang sindry like a railway car
An’ flie in danders.”
II
ILLE TERRARUM
Frae nirly, nippin’, Eas’lan’ breeze,
Frae Norlan’ snaw, an’ haar o’ seas,
Weel happit in your gairden trees,
A bonny bit,
Atween the muckle Pentland’s knees,
Secure ye sit.
Beeches an’ aiks entwine their theek,
An’ firs, a stench, auld-farrant clique.
A simmer day, your chimleys reek,
Couthy and bien;
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 384
