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Robert Louis Stevenson > A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods > XXXVII. “My body which my dungeon is” |
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| CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD |
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| Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894). A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods. 1913. |
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XXXVII. “My body which my dungeon is”
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| MY body which my dungeon is, | |
| And yet my parks and palaces:— | |
| Which is so great that there I go | |
| All the day long to and fro, | |
| And when the night begins to fall | 5 |
| Throw down my bed and sleep, while all | |
| The buildings hum with wakefulness— | |
| Even as a child of savages | |
| When evening takes her on her way, | |
| (She having roamed a summer’s day | 10 |
| Along the mountain-sides and scalp) | |
| Sleep in an antre of that alp:— | |
| Which is so broad and high that there, | |
| As in the topless fields of air, | |
| My fancy soars like to a kite | 15 |
| And faints in the blue infinite:— | |
| Which is so strong, my strongest throes | |
| And the rough world’s besieging blows | |
| Not break it, and so weak withal, | |
| Death ebbs and flows in its loose wall | 20 |
| As the green sea in fishers’ nets, | |
| And tops its topmost parapets:— | |
| Which is so wholly mine that I | |
| Can wield its whole artillery, | |
| And mine so little, that my soul | 25 |
| Dwells in perpetual control, | |
| And I but think and speak and do | |
| As my dead fathers move me to:— | |
| If this born body of my bones | |
| The beggared soul so barely owns, | 30 |
| What money passed from hand to hand, | |
| What creeping custom of the land, | |
| What deed of author or assign, | |
| Can make a house a thing of mine? | |
