Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/351

 the Royal Opera at Berlin in 1895. The others did not come up for breath.

“‘Derelict’ was first smudged in in 1891, when Mr. Waller and I were friends and not collaborators. He had not read Treasure Island, whereupon I loaned him the book. The refrain of Long John Silver struck him—as it has countless others—as containing endless lure. He said it called for music and if I would make a song around it he would set it. Next morning I gave him three hazy but singable verses and before night it was set musically and the manuscript was sent off to Pond & Co., and met immediate acceptance and publication. It was fine, grisly music, but I recognized that the words were inadequate and so began the work of polishing and constructing. It took about six years to get it to suit me. I was after an atmosphere of the perfect silence of dead life filled with horror by the refrain. There came other verses which did not ‘belong,’ and all that, and they never got in.”

But there is still one other which he has in mind—a stanza celebrating Captain Flint’s green parrot with its “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” It is awaited with the most pleasurable anticipations!

There have been various extensions of Stevenson’s quatrain by other hands, and some of them have been set to music, but none of them