Page:Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Hitherto unpublished, 1921.djvu/74

 her is shown in many of his early lyrics; but when (we must believe because of parental objection), he was forced to break with this girl whose status and antecedents may have justified his family's opposition, and when in 1872 he was sent by his parents to the continent, her love may well have changed to the hatred prophesied in the closing lines of the following verses.

Analyzing the poem from the point of view here taken we are confronted in the first stanza with a quarrel between the lovers. It is barely possible that a misunderstanding, due to some cause no longer ascertainable, led to the break in relations; but far more probably the approaching separation was the cause of a scene in which Stevenson was upbraided and misjudged. The second stanza leads to the surmise that although agreeing to a temporary separation. Stevenson had promised loyalty to the girl if she would remain true to him. In the third stanza, with the passionate expression of his love for her, appears one of those sentences that belong only to his early days—even then very rarely, for later in life he never attributed the [ 66 ]