Poems, by Robert Louis Stevenson, hitherto unpublished/I sit up here at midnight
I SIT UP HERE AT MIDNIGHT
1871-1872
Here again, were it not for the word "Inchcape"' in the third stanza, we should at first glance feel almost convinced that the present verses are a translation from Heine, so closely both in style and in spirit does the Scottish poet follow the German master. "Inch," meaning an island, is so unmistakably an index of Scottish local nomenclature that it saves us the trouble of going through the works of Heine to find the supposed original; but we can never come upon a more convincing evidence of the intensity of Stevenson's study of the great German lyrist. The metre is the one that Heine most used; the simplicity of the sentences is in his vein, only one simile in the first stanza and one metaphor in the fifth interrupting the sheer directness of description. And if this were truly a Stevenson poem, and not a Heine-Stevenson poem, the subject would be treated in a more personal manner, and would lack the dramatic objectivity which is so often a striking element in Heine's poems of this nature. Then, at the end, how altogether Heine the closing line, "The foolish fisher woman!" Stevenson never would have thought of calling her that, unless he were unconsciously writing with Heine's mind. After picturing two scenes—the skipper husband in the storm, and the terrified wife at home—after arousing our sympathy for a loving woman in anguish, Heine alone, of all poets it would seem, would have ironically inwoven the note of tenderness in the "foolish fisherwoman," mocking himself and his own experiences, in thus regarding, with a wry smile of ridiculing pity, the misery of human love.
I SIT UP HERE AT MIDNIGHT
I sit up here at midnight,
The wind is in the street,
The rain besieges the windows
Like the sound of many feet.
I see the street lamps flicker,
I see them wink and fail;
The streets are wet and empty,
It blows an easterly gale.
Some think of the fisher skipper
Beyond the Inchcape stone;
But I of the fisher woman
That lies at home alone.
She raises herself on her elbow
And watches the firelit floor;
Her eyes are bright with terror,
Her heart beats fast and sore.
Between the roar of the flurries,
When the tempest holds its breath,
She holds her breathing also—
It is all as still as death.
She can hear the cinders dropping,
The cat that purrs in its sleep—
The foolish fisher woman!
Her heart is on the deep.