# The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Vailima ed.)/Volume 8/New Poems/Stormy Nights

CXCVI
STORMY NIGHTS
I CRY out war to those who spend their utmost, Trying to substitute a vain regret For childhood's vanished moods, Instead of a full manly satisfaction In new development. Their words are vain as the lost shouts, The wasted breath of solitary hunters That are far buried in primeval woods— Clamour that dies in silence, Cries that bring back no answer But the great voice of the wind-shaken forest, Mocking despair.
No—they will get no answer; For I too recollect, ​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, ​And ever baffled, ever shut from passage:— Then when the house shook and a horde of noises Came out and clattered over me all night,— Then, would my heart stand still, My hair creep fearfully upon my head And, with my tear-wet face Buried among the bed-clothes, Long and bitterly would I pray and wrestle Till gentle sleep Threw her great mantle over me, And my hard breathing gradually ceased.
I was then the Indian, Well and happy and full of glee and pleasure, Both hands full of life. And not without divine impulses Shot into me by the untried non-ego; But, like the Indian, too, Not yet exempt from feverish questionings And on my bed of leaves, Writhing terribly in grasp of terror, As when the still stars and the great white moon Watch me athwart black foliage, Trembling before the interminable vista, The widening wells of space In which my thought flags like a wearied bird In the mid ocean of his autumn flight— Prostrate before the indefinite great spirit That the external warder Plunged like a dagger Into my bosom. ​Now, I am a Greek White-robed among the sunshine and the statues And the fair porticos of carven marble— Fond of olives and dry sherry, Good tobacco and clever talk with my fellows, Free from inordinate cravings.
Why would you hurry me, O evangelist, You with the bands and the shilling packet of tracts Greatly reduced when taken for distribution? Why do you taunt my progress, O green-spectacled Wordsworth! in beautiful verses, You, the elderly poet? So I shall travel forward Step by step with the rest of my race, In time, if death should spare me, I shall come on to a farther stage. And show you St. Francis of Assisi.