Page:Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Hitherto unpublished, 1921.djvu/66

 I SIT UP HERE AT MIDNIGHT

1871-1872

Here again, were it not for the word "Inchcape"' [sic] in the third stanza, we should at first glance feel almost convinced that the present verses are a translation from Heine, so closely both in style and in spirit does the Scottish poet follow the German master. "Inch," meaning an island, is so unmistakably an index of Scottish local nomenclature that it saves us the trouble of going through the works of Heine to find the supposed original; but we can never come upon a more convincing evidence of the intensity of Stevenson's study of the great German lyrist. The metre is the one that Heine most used; the simplicity of the sentences is in his vein, only one simile in the first stanza and one metaphor in the fifth interrupting the sheer directness of description. And if this were truly a Stevenson poem, and not a Heine-Stevenson poem, the subject would be treated in a more personal manner, and would lack the dramatic objectivity which is so often a striking element in Heine's poems of this nature. Then, at the [ 58 ]