Page:Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Hitherto unpublished, 1921.djvu/116

 ALL NIGHT THROUGH, RAVES OR BROODS—1876

We have already called attention to the fact that the winter of 1876 was a period of such melancholy brooding for Stevenson, that he lacked the energy even for correspondence, two or three cheerless letters being the sum total of his efforts of that kind; while two poems of that winter, to be found in the Bibliophile edition of 1916, are among the most despondent that came from his pen.

The present poem belongs to the same month, March, as the pair just mentioned, and it was presumably written on the same day as the short poem entitled "Soon Our Friends Perish." The evidence for this is furnished by Stevenson's marginal comment on the previously published manuscript where, after asking why God has deserted him, he adds: "And why does the damned wind rave in my ears?" In the present poem the lines occur—

the same wind, presumably, as raved on that same night. But, as we so often find in [ 102 ]