Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (509 page)

If then at all we keep the touch of joy,

Thou shalt rejoice to find me altered — I,

O Felix, to behold thee still unchanged.

XXI

The morning drum-call on my eager ear

Thrills unforgotten yet; the morning dew

Lies yet undried along my field of noon.

But now I pause at whiles in what I do,

And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear

(My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon.

XXII

I have trod the upward and the downward slope;

I have endured and done in days before;

I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope;

And I have lived and loved, and closed the door.

XXIII

He hears with gladdened heart the thunder

Peal, and loves the falling dew;

He knows the earth above and under —

Sits and is content to view.

He sits beside the dying ember,

God for hope and man for friend,

Content to see, glad to remember,

Expectant of the certain end.

XXIV

Farewell, fair day and fading light!

The clay-born here, with westward sight,

Marks the huge sun now downward soar.

Farewell. We twain shall meet no more.

Farewell. I watch with bursting sigh

My late contemned occasion die.

I linger useless in my tent:

Farewell, fair day, so foully spent!

Farewell, fair day. If any God

At all consider this poor clod,

He who the fair occasion sent

Prepared and placed the impediment.

Let Him diviner vengeance take —

Give me to sleep, give me to wake

Girded and shod, and bid me play

The hero in the coming day!

XXV

IF THIS WERE FAITH

God, if this were enough,

That I see things bare to the buff

And up to the buttocks in mire;

That I ask nor hope nor hire,

Nut in the husk,

Nor dawn beyond the dusk,

Nor life beyond death:

God, if this were faith?

Having felt Thy wind in my face

Spit sorrow and disgrace,

Having seen Thine evil doom

In Golgotha and Khartoum,

And the brutes, the work of Thine hands,

Fill with injustice lands

And stain with blood the sea:

If still in my veins the glee

Of the black night and the sun

And the lost battle, run:

If, an adept,

The iniquitous lists I still accept

With joy, and joy to endure and be withstood,

And still to battle and perish for a dream of good:

God, if that were enough?

If to feel in the ink of the slough,

And the sink of the mire,

Veins of glory and fire

Run through and transpierce and transpire,

And a secret purpose of glory in every part,

And the answering glory of battle fill my heart;

To thrill with the joy of girded men,

To go on for ever and fail and go on again,

And be mauled to the earth and arise,

And contend for the shade of a word and a thing not seen with the eyes:

With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night

That somehow the right is the right

And the smooth shall bloom from the rough:

Lord, if that were enough?

XXVI

MY WIFE

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,

With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,

Steel-true and blade-straight,

The great artificer

Made my mate.

Honour, anger, valour, fire;

A love that life could never tire,

Death quench or evil stir,

The mighty master

Gave to her.

Teacher, tender, comrade, wife,

A fellow-farer true through life,

Heart-whole and soul-free

The august father

Gave to me.

XXVII

TO THE MUSE

Resign the rhapsody, the dream,

To men of larger reach;

Be ours the quest of a plain theme,

The piety of speech.

As monkish scribes from morning break

Toiled till the close of light,

Nor thought a day too long to make

One line or letter bright:

We also with an ardent mind,

Time, wealth, and fame forgot,

Our glory in our patience find

And skim, and skim the pot:

Till last, when round the house we hear

The evensong of birds,

One corner of blue heaven appear

In our clear well of words.

Leave, leave it then, muse of my heart!

Sans finish and sans frame,

Leave unadorned by needless art

The picture as it came.

XXVIII

TO AN ISLAND PRINCESS

Since long ago, a child at home,

I read and longed to rise and roam,

Where’er I went, whate’er I willed,

One promised land my fancy filled.

Hence the long roads my home I made;

Tossed much in ships; have often laid

Below the uncurtained sky my head,

Rain-deluged and wind-buffeted:

And many a thousand hills I crossed

And corners turned — Love’s labour lost,

Till, Lady, to your isle of sun

I came not hoping; and, like one

Snatched out of blindness, rubbed my eyes,

And hailed my promised land with cries.

Yes, Lady, here I was at last;

Here found I all I had forecast:

The long roll of the sapphire sea

That keeps the land’s virginity;

The stalwart giants of the wood

Laden with toys and flowers and food;

The precious forest pouring out

To compass the whole town about;

The town itself with streets of lawn,

Loved of the moon, blessed by the dawn,

Where the brown children all the day,

Keep up a ceaseless noise of play,

Play in the sun, play in the rain,

Nor ever quarrel or complain; —

And late at night, in the woods of fruit,

Hark I do you hear the passing flute?

I threw one look to either hand,

And knew I was in Fairyland.

And yet one point of being so

I lacked. For, Lady (as you know),

Whoever by his might of hand

Won entrance into Fairyland,

Found always with admiring eyes

A Fairy princess kind and wise.

It was not long I waited; soon

Upon my threshold, in broad noon,

Gracious and helpful, wise and good,

The Fairy Princess Moë stood.

Tantira, Tahiti,
Nov. ,
.

 This is the same Princess Moë whose charms of person and disposition have been recorded by the late Lord Pembroke in “South Sea Bubbles,” and by M. Pierre Loti in the “Mariage de Loti.”

XXIX

TO KALAKAUA

(WITH A PRESENT OF A PEARL)

The Silver Ship, my King — that was her name

In the bright islands whence your fathers came —

The Silver Ship, at rest from winds and tides,

Below your palace in your harbour rides:

And the seafarers, sitting safe on shore,

Like eager merchants count their treasures o’er.

One gift they find, one strange and lovely thing,

Now doubly precious since it pleased a king.

The right, my liege, is ancient as the lyre

For bards to give to kings what kings admire.

‘Tis mine to offer for Apollo’s sake;

And since the gift is fitting, yours to take.

To golden hands the golden pearl I bring:

The ocean jewel to the island king.

Honolulu,
Feb. ,
.

The yacht
Casco
had been so called by the people of Fakarava in Tahiti.

XXX

TO PRINCESS KAIULANI

[Written in April to Kaiulani in the April of her age; and at Waikiki, within easy walk of Kaiulani’s banyan! When she comes to my land and her father’s, and the rain beats upon the window (as I fear it will), let her look at this page; it will be like a weed gathered and pressed at home; and she will remember her own islands, and the shadow of the mighty tree; and she will hear the peacocks screaming in the dusk and the wind blowing in the palms; and she will think of her father sitting there alone. — R. L. S.]

Forth from her land to mine she goes,

The island maid, the island rose,

Light of heart and bright of face:

The daughter of a double race.

Her islands here, in Southern sun,

Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone,

And I, in her dear banyan shade,

Look vainly for my little maid.

But our Scots islands far away

Shall glitter with unwonted day,

And cast for once their tempests by

To smile in Kaiulani’s eye.

Honolulu.

XXXI

TO MOTHER MARYANNE

To see the infinite pity of this place,

The mangled limb, the devastated face,

The innocent sufferer smiling at the rod —

A fool were tempted to deny his God.

He sees, he shrinks. But if he gaze again,

Lo, beauty springing from the breast of pain;

He marks the sisters on the mournful shores;

And even a fool is silent and adores.

Guest House, Kalawao, Molokai.

XXXII

IN MEMORIAM E.H.

I knew a silver head was bright beyond compare,

I knew a queen of toil with a crown of silver hair.

Garland of valour and sorrow, of beauty and renown,

Life, that honours the brave, crowned her himself with the crown.

The beauties of youth are frail, but this was a jewel of age.

Life, that delights in the brave, gave it himself for a gage.

Fair was the crown to behold, and beauty its poorest part —

At once the scar of the wound and the order pinned on the heart.

The beauties of man are frail, and the silver lies in the dust,

And the queen that we call to mind sleeps with the brave and the just;

Sleeps with the weary at length; but, honoured and ever fair,

Shines in the eye of the mind the crown of the silver hair.

Honolulu.

XXXIII

TO MY WIFE

(A FRAGMENT)

Long must elapse ere you behold again

Green forest frame the entry of the lane —

The wild lane with the bramble and the briar,

The year-old cart-tracks perfect in the mire,

The wayside smoke, perchance, the dwarfish huts,

And ramblers’ donkey drinking from the ruts: —

Long ere you trace how deviously it leads,

Back from man’s chimneys and the bleating meads

To the woodland shadow, to the silvan hush,

When but the brooklet chuckles in the brush —

Back from the sun and bustle of the vale

To where the great voice of the nightingale

Fills all the forest like a single room,

And all the banks smell of the golden broom;

So wander on until the eve descends,

And back returning to your firelit friends,

You see the rosy sun, despoiled of light,

Hung, caught in thickets, like a schoolboy’s kite.

Here from the sea the unfruitful sun shall rise,

Bathe the bare deck and blind the unshielded eyes;

The allotted hours aloft shall wheel in vain

And in the unpregnant ocean plunge again.

Assault of squalls that mock the watchful guard,

And pluck the bursting canvas from the yard,

And senseless clamour of the calm, at night

Must mar your slumbers. By the plunging light,

In beetle-haunted, most unwomanly bower

Of the wild-swerving cabin, hour by hour....

Schooner
Equator
.

XXXIV

TO MY OLD FAMILIARS

Do you remember — can we e’er forget? —

How, in the coiled perplexities of youth,

In our wild climate, in our scowling town,

We gloomed and shivered, sorrowed, sobbed and feared?

The belching winter wind, the missile rain,

The rare and welcome silence of the snows,

The laggard morn, the haggard day, the night,

The grimy spell of the nocturnal town,

Do you remember? — Ah, could one forget!

As when the fevered sick that all night long

Listed the wind intone, and hear at last

The ever-welcome voice of chanticleer

Sing in the bitter hour before the dawn, —

With sudden ardour, these desire the day:

So sang in the gloom of youth the bird of hope;

So we, exulting, hearkened and desired.

For lo! as in the palace porch of life

We huddled with chimeras, from within —

How sweet to hear! — the music swelled and fell,

And through the breach of the revolving doors

What dreams of splendour blinded us and fled!

I have since then contended and rejoiced;

Amid the glories of the house of life

Profoundly entered, and the shrine beheld:

Yet when the lamp from my expiring eyes

Shall dwindle and recede, the voice of love

Fall insignificant on my closing ears,

What sound shall come but the old cry of the wind

In our inclement city? what return

But the image of the emptiness of youth,

Filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice

Of discontent and rapture and despair?

So, as in darkness, from the magic lamp,

The momentary pictures gleam and fade

And perish, and the night resurges — these

Shall I remember, and then all forget.