Month: April 2020

OK, so far our poets have been Wallace Stevens (Nomad Exquisite), Edna St Vincent Millay (Recuerdo), Dylan Thomas (Death Shall Have No Dominion), Emily Dickinson (The Brain is Wider Than The Sky) and Robert Louis Stevenson (Where Go the Boats? from A Child’s Garden of Verses).

I’ll go into detail about all of these later, but I just wanted to mention that there will be children’s poems out there on the Stand. My mother read us poetry, I read it to my children…and I don’t think enough people read it to their children now, or were even taught it themselves.

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, and then spent a great part of his life traveling and writing. He wrote many famous adventure stories popular into the mid-20th century (such as Treasure Island), and even scary ones such as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as charming accounts of his travels. My favorite is Travels With A Donkey, written in 1879 and telling of his trip (with his donkey) through Southern France.

But he traveled further, eventually marrying an American who was living in France at the time they met, then migrating across the US with her and ending up in San Francisco, where the family lived for awhile. But Stevenson and his wife and children then kept going west and ended up in Samoa.

He wrote fiction and poetry aimed at children and adults, but the book I love the best is A Child’s Garden of Verses, a collection of poems for children – 19th century children, so you’ll find lots of references to carrying a candle to light you to bed. For The Poetry Stand, I took a photo of one of the illustrations in the 1896 edition. These great drawings were done by the artist Charles Robinson.

Robert Louis Stevenson died suddenly of an aneurism in Samoa 1894 at the age of only 44. And here is how he looked to Charles Robinson.

A poet to the end, he wrote the epitaph that appears on his gravestone in Samoa:

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me;
“Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”

In my yard on Forbes St. in Jacksonville, I have a Poetry Stand…that is, a stand that gives away poetry for free! All you have to do is walk by and look at it and it’s just like sharing a book.

In these times, when we are all encouraged to stay so distant from each other, we have probably never had more need of this gentle sharing. And I have decided to share it beyond my yard through this blog.

Of course, sharing poetry is much more complicated now because of the restrictions of copyright laws (although I’m sure most poets would much rather have more people read their poems) , so I can only quote a certain number of words here and hope that all the rest are out of copyright. And this isn’t a commercial site, so it shouldn’t be a problem. But I’m any case I can give you the name of the poem, a few factoids about the author, and then you can take it from there.

So I finish with a few words from Robinson Jeffers in his poem, To The Stone Cutters, where he reflects that carved stones have stood for millenia and

“..pained thoughts have found

the honey of peace in old poems.“