Poems, by Robert Louis Stevenson, hitherto unpublished/Yes, I remember, etc.

YES, I REMEMBER, AND, STILL REMEMBER WAILING—1881

The comment at the bottom of the manuscript page—

Brown in his haste demanded this from me;
I in my leisure made the present verse

would seem to establish the place, as well as the year of the composition of these verses, wherein the poet uses, for metrical experimentation, the memories of his first voyage to America. The discussions of John Addington Symonds, Horatio F. Brown and Stevenson—men interested in certain classical forms of verse—led Stevenson to various successful efforts in English Alcaics, a group of such poems being included in the two-volume Bibliophile edition of Stevenson's poems. With this group belong the present verses, written at Davos in 1881; and they are of special interest because the attempt in rhymeless verses in the first eleven lines is followed by a rhymed rendering of the same theme in the last eight lines.

We know of no other poem of Stevenson's, based on that adventurous sea trip when, after having left home without announcing his plans or bidding his friends farewell, the young author, ill and almost penniless, travelled on an emigrant ship toward a strange land where the woman he loved was awaiting him. It was in 1879 that Stevenson embarked; and the closing months of that year and the early months of 1880, constitute the period when his fortune was at its nadir, with sickness, and moments almost of starvation and despair, very nearly pulling him under. But even so, numerous poems of those days give evidence of that will and courage which he never quite lost, and in the present verses we find the poor emigrant raising his voice in songs of home. By the time—two years later—when he recorded in these experimental verses the memories of that difficult ocean voyage, home associations had been renewed, and he was again in Europe, with a wife who had at once won her way into the affections of his parents.


YES, I REMEMBER, AND STILL REMEMBER WAILING

Yes, I remember, and still remember wailing
Wind in the clouds and rainy sea-horizon,

Empty and lit with a low nocturnal glimmer;
How in the strong, deep-plunging, transatlantic
Emigrant ship we sang our songs in chorus.
Piping, the gull flew by, the roaring billows
Jammed and resounded round the mighty vessel;
Infinite uproar, endless contradiction;
Yet over all our chorus rose, reminding
Wanderers here at sea of unforgotten
Homes and the undying, old, memorial loves.

R. L. Stevenson, esq.

Here in the strong, deep-plunging transatlantic
Emigrant ship the waves arose gigantic;
Piping the gull flew by, the roaring billows
Rose and appeared before the eye like pillows.
Piping the gull flew by, the roaring waves
Rose and appeared from subter-ocean caves,
And as across the smoothing sea we roam,
Still and anon we sang our songs of home.


Brown in his haste demanded this from me;
I in my leisure made the present verse.