I am coming towards the end of my alphabet of Victorian poets and today we move on to the letter 'S' with Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894).
He will be best known to most of you as the author of "Treasure Island" (1883), a tale of piracy, buried treasure and adventure, which was his first major success.
He also wrote "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", "Kidnapped" and "The Master of Ballantrae".
However, I am posting one of his poems, which illustrates his power of imagery as he discovers a phantom army in the flames of an open fire.
(First posted here in December 2007)
ARMIES IN THE FIRE
The lamps now glitter down the street;
Faintly sound the falling feet;
And the blue even slowly falls
About the garden trees and walls.
Now in the falling of the gloom
The red fire paints the empty room:
And warmly on the roof it looks,
And flickers on the back of books.
Armies march by tower and spire
Of cities blazing, in the fire;--
Till as I gaze with staring eyes,
The armies fall, the lustre dies.
Then once again the glow returns;
Again the phantom city burns;
And down the red-hot valley, lo!
The phantom armies marching go!
Blinking embers, tell me true
Where are those armies marching to,
And what the burning city is
That crumbles in your furnaces!
Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson's poetry-as it exists is in many ways less Victorian than one would suppose. A look at his nature POEMS such as the one where he describes the whaups would point to his connections with the rasping consonantal use of the Scottish vernacular. Thus though differnt in style,he has links with poets such as Burns...stevenson is in some ways an internationalist reflecting a edinburger sense of cosmopolitanism that incorporates a vernacular idiom...it begs the question of what is a victorian poet. in simple terms perhaps it only means one who wrote in that queeen's reign though Tennyson would i think typify some of the values of that era
hugs john