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    Ballads
    Ballads
    Ballads
    Ebook72 pages59 minutes

    Ballads

    By Robert Louis Stevenson

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    About this ebook

    Poetry. According to Wikipedia: "Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson (1850 - 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. M. Barrie. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their definition of modernism. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeltzer Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2018
    ISBN9781455373888
    Ballads
    Author

    Robert Louis Stevenson

    Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist. His most popular works include Treasure Island, A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped.

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      Book preview

      Ballads - Robert Louis Stevenson

      BALLADS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

      published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

      established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

      Books by Robert Louis Stevenson:

      Across the Plains

      The Art of Writing

      Ballads

      Black Arrow

      The Bottle Imp

      Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

      A Child's Garden of Verses

      The Ebb-Tide

      Edinburgh

      Essays

      Essays of Travel

      Fables

      Familiar Studies of Men and Books

      Father Damien

      Footnote to History

      In the South Seas

      An Inland Voyage

      Island Nights' Entertainments

      Kidnapped

      Lay Morals

      Letters

      Lodging for the Night

      Markheim

      Master of Ballantrae

      Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

      Memories and Portraits

      Merry Men

      Moral Emblems

      New Arabian Nights

      New Poems

      The Pavilion on the Links

      Four Plays

      The Pocket R. L. S.

      Prayers Written at Vailima

      Prince Otto

      Records of a Family of Engineers

      The Sea Fogs

      The Silverado Squatters

      Songs of Travel

      St. Ives

      The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

      Tales and Fantasies

      Thrawn Janet

      Travels with a Donkey

      Treasure Island

      Underwoods

      Vailima Letters

      Virginibus Puerisque

      The Waif Woman

      Weir of Hermiston

      The Wrecker

      The Wrong Box

      feedback welcome: info@samizdat.com

      visit us at samizdat.com

      THE SONG OF RAHERO

      A LEGEND OF TAHITI

      TO ORI A ORI

      ORI, my brother in the island mode,

      In every tongue and meaning much my friend,

      This story of your country and your clan,

      In your loved house, your too much honoured guest,

      I made in English.  Take it, being done;

      And let me sign it with the name you gave.

      TERIITERA.

      I. THE SLAYING OF TAMATEA

      IT fell in the days of old, as the men of Taiarapu tell,

      A youth went forth to the fishing, and fortune favoured him well.

      Tamatea his name: gullible, simple, and kind,

      Comely of countenance, nimble of body, empty of mind,

      His mother ruled him and loved him beyond the wont of a wife,

      Serving the lad for eyes and living herself in his life.

      Alone from the sea and the fishing came Tamatea the fair,

      Urging his boat to the beach, and the mother awaited him there,

      - Long may you live! said she.  "Your fishing has sped to a wish.

      And now let us choose for the king the fairest of all your fish.

      For fear inhabits the palace and grudging grows in the land,

      Marked is the sluggardly foot and marked the niggardly hand,

      The hours and the miles are counted, the tributes numbered and weighed,

      And woe to him that comes short, and woe to him that delayed!"

      So spoke on the beach the mother, and counselled the wiser thing.

      For Rahero stirred in the country and secretly mined the king.

      Nor were the signals wanting of how the leaven wrought,

      In the cords of obedience loosed and the tributes grudgingly brought.

      And when last to the temple of Oro the boat with the victim sped,

      And the priest uncovered the basket and looked on the face of the dead,

      Trembling fell upon all at sight of an ominous thing,

      For there was the aito (1) dead, and he of the house of the king.

      So spake on the beach the mother, matter worthy of note,

      And wattled a basket well, and chose a fish from the boat;

      And Tamatea the pliable shouldered the basket and went,

      And travelled, and sang as he travelled, a lad that was well content.

      Still the way of his going was round by the roaring coast,

      Where the ring of the reef is broke and the trades run riot the most.

      On his left, with smoke as of battle, the billows battered the land;

      Unscalable, turreted mountains rose on the inner hand.

      And cape, and village, and river, and vale, and mountain above,

      Each had a name in the land for men to remember and love;

      And never the name of a place, but lo! a song in its praise:

      Ancient and unforgotten, songs of the earlier days,

      That the elders taught to the young, and at night, in the full of the moon,

      Garlanded boys and maidens sang together in tune.

      Tamatea the placable went with a lingering foot;

      He sang as loud as a bird, he whistled hoarse as a flute;

      He broiled in the sun, he breathed in the grateful shadow of trees,

      In the icy stream of the rivers he waded over the knees;

      And still in his empty mind crowded, a thousand-fold,

      The deeds of the strong and the songs of the cunning heroes of old.

      And now was he come to a place Taiarapu honoured the most,

      Where a silent valley of woods debouched on the noisy coast,

      Spewing a level river.  There was a haunt of Pai. (2)

      There, in his potent youth, when his parents drove him to die,

      Honoura lived like a beast, lacking the lamp and the fire,

      Washed by

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