Page:The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima Edition, Volume 8, 1922.djvu/585

NEW POEMS I recollect and love my perished childhood,

Perfectly love and keenly recollect;

I too remember; and if it could be

Would not recall it.

Do I not know, how, nightly, on my bed

The palpable close darkness shutting round me,

How my small heart went forth to evil things,

How all the possibilities of sin

That were yet present to my innocence

Bound me too narrowly,

And how my spirit beat

The cage of its compulsive purity:

How—my eyes fixed,

My shot lip tremulous between my fingers

I fashioned for myself new modes of crime,

Created for myself with pain and labour

The evil that the cobwebs of society,

The comely secrecies of education,

Had made an itching mystery to meward.

Do I not know again,

When the great winds broke loose and went abroad

At night in the lighted town—

Ah! then it was different—

Then, when I seemed to hear

The storm go by me like a cloak-wrapt horseman

Stooping over the saddle—

Go by, and come again and yet again,

Like some one riding with a pardon, 571