Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (510 page)

Apemama.

XXXV

The tropics vanish, and meseems that I,

From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir,

Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.

Far set in fields and woods, the town I see

Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke,

Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort

Beflagged. About, on seaward-drooping hills,

New folds of city glitter. Last, the Forth

Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles,

And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns.

There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,

Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead,

My dead, the ready and the strong of word.

Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;

The sea bombards their founded towers; the night

Thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers,

One after one, here in this grated cell,

Where the rain erases and the rust consumes,

Fell upon lasting silence. Continents

And continental oceans intervene;

A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle,

Environs and confines their wandering child

In vain. The voice of generations dead

Summons me, sitting distant, to arise,

My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace,

And, all mutation over, stretch me down

In that denoted city of the dead.

Apemama.

XXXVI

TO S. C.

I heard the pulse of the besieging sea

Throb far away all night. I heard the wind

Fly crying and convulse tumultuous palms.

I rose and strolled. The isle was all bright sand,

And flailing fans and shadows of the palm;

The heaven all moon and wind and the blind vault;

The keenest planet slain, for Venus slept.

The king, my neighbour, with his host of wives,

Slept in the precinct of the palisade;

Where single, in the wind, under the moon,

Among the slumbering cabins, blazed a fire,

Sole street-lamp and the only sentinel.

To other lands and nights my fancy turned —

To London first, and chiefly to your house,

The many-pillared and the well-beloved.

There yearning fancy lighted; there again

In the upper room I lay, and heard far off

The unsleeping city murmur like a shell;

The muffled tramp of the Museum guard

Once more went by me; I beheld again

Lamps vainly brighten the dispeopled street;

Again I longed for the returning morn,

The awaking traffic, the bestirring birds,

The consentaneous trill of tiny song

That weaves round monumental cornices

A passing charm of beauty. Most of all,

For your light foot I wearied, and your knock

That was the glad réveillé of my day.

Lo, now, when to your task in the great house

At morning through the portico you pass,

One moment glance, where by the pillared wall

Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke,

Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument

Of faiths forgot and races undivined;

Sit now disconsolate, remembering well

The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd,

The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice,

Incessant, of the breakers on the shore.

As far as these from their ancestral shrine,

So far, so foreign, your divided friends

Wander, estranged in body, not in mind.

Apemama.

XXXVII

THE HOUSE OF TEMBINOKA

[At my departure from the island of Apemama, for which you will look in vain in most atlases, the King and I agreed, since we both set up to be in the poetical way, that we should celebrate our separation in verse. Whether or not his Majesty has been true to his bargain, the laggard posts of the Pacific may perhaps inform me in six months, perhaps not before a year. The following lines represent my part of the contract, and it is hoped, by their pictures of strange manners, they may entertain a civilised audience. Nothing throughout has been invented or exaggerated; the lady herein referred to as the author’s muse has confined herself to stringing into rhyme facts or legends that I saw or heard during two months’ residence upon the island. — R. L. S.]

ENVOI

Let us, who part like brothers, part like bards;

And you in your tongue and measure, I in mine,

Our now division duly solemnise.

Unlike the strains, and yet the theme is one:

The strains unlike, and how unlike their fate!

You to the blinding palace-yard shall call

The prefect of the singers, and to him,

Listening devout, your valedictory verse

Deliver; he, his attribute fulfilled,

To the island chorus hand your measures on,

Wed now with harmony: so them, at last,

Night after night, in the open hall of dance,

Shall thirty matted men, to the clapped hand,

Intone and bray and bark. Unfortunate!

Paper and print alone shall honour mine.

THE SONG

Let now the King his ear arouse

And toss the bosky ringlets from his brows,

The while, our bond to implement,

My muse relates and praises his descent.

I

Bride of the shark, her valour first I sing

Who on the lone seas quickened of a King.

She, from the shore and puny homes of men,

Beyond the climber’s sea-discerning ken,

Swam, led by omens; and devoid of fear,

Beheld her monstrous paramour draw near.

She gazed; all round her to the heavenly pale,

The simple sea was void of isle or sail —

Sole overhead the unsparing sun was reared —

When the deep bubbled and the brute appeared.

But she, secure in the decrees of fate,

Made strong her bosom and received the mate,

And, men declare, from that marine embrace

Conceived the virtues of a stronger race.

II

Her stern descendant next I praise,

Survivor of a thousand frays: —

In the hall of tongues who ruled the throng;

Led and was trusted by the strong;

And when spears were in the wood,

Like a tower of vantage stood: —

Whom, not till seventy years had sped,

Unscarred of breast, erect of head,

Still light of step, still bright of look,

The hunter, Death, had overtook.

III

His sons, the brothers twain, I sing.

Of whom the elder reigned a King.

No Childeric he, yet much declined

From his rude sire’s imperious mind,

Until his day came when he died,

He lived, he reigned, he versified.

But chiefly him I celebrate

That was the pillar of the state,

Ruled, wise of word and bold of mien,

The peaceful and the warlike scene;

And played alike the leader’s part

In lawful and unlawful art.

His soldiers with emboldened ears

Heard him laugh among the spears.

He could deduce from age to age

The web of island parentage;

Best lay the rhyme, best lead the dance,

For any festal circumstance:

And fitly fashion oar and boat,

A palace or an armour coat.

None more availed than he to raise

The strong, suffumigating blaze,

Or knot the wizard leaf: none more,

Upon the untrodden windward shore

Of the isle, beside the beating main,

To cure the sickly and constrain,

With muttered words and waving rods,

The gibbering and the whistling gods.

But he, though thus with hand and head

He ruled, commanded, charmed, and led,

And thus in virtue and in might

Towered to contemporary sight —

Still in fraternal faith and love,

Remained below to reach above,

Gave and obeyed the apt command,

Pilot and vassal of the land.

IV

My Tembinok’ from men like these

Inherited his palaces,

His right to rule, his powers of mind,

His cocoa-islands sea-enshrined.

Stern bearer of the sword and whip,

A master passed in mastership,

He learned, without the spur of need,

To write, to cipher, and to read;

From all that touch on his prone shore

Augments his treasury of lore,

Eager in age as erst in youth

To catch an art, to learn a truth,

To paint on the internal page

A clearer picture of the age.

His age, you say? But ah, not so!

In his lone isle of long ago,

A royal Lady of Shalott,

Sea-sundered, he beholds it not;

He only hears it far away.

The stress of equatorial day

He suffers; he records the while

The vapid annals of the isle;

Slaves bring him praise of his renown,

Or cackle of the palm-tree town;

The rarer ship and the rare boat

He marks; and only hears remote,

Where thrones and fortunes rise and reel,

The thunder of the turning wheel.

V

For the unexpected tears he shed

At my departing, may his lion head

Not whiten, his revolving years

No fresh occasion minister of tears;

At book or cards, at work or sport,

Him may the breeze across the palace court

For ever fan; and swelling near

For ever the loud song divert his ear.

Schooner
Equator
, at Sea.

XXXVIII

THE WOODMAN

In all the grove, nor stream nor bird

Nor aught beside my blows was heard,

And the woods wore their noonday dress —

The glory of their silentness.

From the island summit to the seas,

Trees mounted, and trees drooped, and trees

Groped upward in the gaps. The green

Inarboured talus and ravine

By fathoms. By the multitude,

The rugged columns of the wood

And bunches of the branches stood:

Thick as a mob, deep as a sea,

And silent as eternity.

With lowered axe, with backward head,

Late from this scene my labourer fled,

And with a ravelled tale to tell,

Returned. Some denizen of hell,

Dead man or disinvested god,

Had close behind him peered and trod,

And triumphed when he turned to flee.

How different fell the lines with me!

Whose eye explored the dim arcade

Impatient of the uncoming shade —

Shy elf, or dryad pale and cold,

Or mystic lingerer from of old:

Vainly. The fair and stately things,

Impassive as departed kings,

All still in the wood’s stillness stood,

And dumb. The rooted multitude

Nodded and brooded, bloomed and dreamed,

Unmeaning, undivined. It seemed

No other art, no hope, they knew,

Than clutch the earth and seek the blue.

‘Mid vegetable king and priest

And stripling, I (the only beast)

Was at the beast’s work, killing; hewed

The stubborn roots across, bestrewed

The glebe with the dislustred leaves,

And bade the saplings fall in sheaves;

Bursting across the tangled math

A ruin that I called a path,

A Golgotha that, later on,

When rains had watered, and suns shone,

And seeds enriched the place, should bear

And be called garden. Here and there,

I spied and plucked by the green hair

A foe more resolute to live,

The toothed and killing sensitive.

He, semi-conscious, fled the attack;

He shrank and tucked his branches back;

And straining by his anchor strand,

Captured and scratched the rooting hand.

I saw him crouch, I felt him bite;

And straight my eyes were touched with sight.

I saw the wood for what it was;

The lost and the victorious cause;

The deadly battle pitched in line,

Saw silent weapons cross and shine:

Silent defeat, silent assault,

A battle and a burial vault.

Thick round me in the teeming mud

Briar and fern strove to the blood.

The hooked liana in his gin

Noosed his reluctant neighbours in:

There the green murderer throve and spread,

Upon his smothering victims fed,

And wantoned on his climbing coil.

Contending roots fought for the soil

Like frightened demons: with despair

Competing branches pushed for air.

Green conquerors from overhead

Bestrode the bodies of their dead;

The Caesars of the silvan field,

Unused to fail, foredoomed to yield:

For in the groins of branches, lo!

The cancers of the orchid grow.

Silent as in the listed ring

Two chartered wrestlers strain and cling,

Dumb as by yellow Hooghly’s side

The suffocating captives died:

So hushed the woodland warfare goes

Unceasing; and the silent foes

Grapple and smother, strain and clasp

Without a cry, without a gasp.

Here also sound Thy fans, O God,

Here too Thy banners move abroad:

Forest and city, sea and shore,

And the whole earth, Thy threshing-floor!

The drums of war, the drums of peace,

Roll through our cities without cease,

And all the iron halls of life

Ring with the unremitting strife.