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  • ‘I will make you brooches and toys for your delight’
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‘I will make you brooches and toys for your delight’

Robert Louis Stevenson

I will make you brooches and toys for your delight
Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.
I will make a palace fit for you and me
Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.

I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room,
Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom,
And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white
In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night.

And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.


Robert Louis Stevenson

from Songs of Travel (1895), and included in The Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh University Press, 2003).

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Robert Louis Stevenson1850 - 1894

It is sadly ironic that RLS, under whose pen Scotland and the Scottish character burst into life, was exiled to a life and death so far from his native land.
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