Роберт Льюис Стивенсон
Underwoods

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, 1881.

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 tugg’d 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 Jacques
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 ²

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 ³

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

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’ after 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 spier; an’ I, his mou to steik:
“No bein’ fit to write in Greek,
      I write in Lallan,
Dear to my heart as the peat reek,
      Auld as Tantallon.

“Few spak it then, an’ noo there’s nane.
My puir auld sangs lie a’ their lane,
Their sense, that aince was braw an’ plain,
      Tint a’thegether,
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.”