The Proper Pirate by Singer Jefferson A.;

Author:Singer, Jefferson A.; [Singer, Jefferson A.;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199328543
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2016-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tracing Imagination’s Journey Through the Poems

To visit the manse at Colinton is to see in a relatively confined space a great passion play of interior life that possessed Stevenson as a boy. On the sloped ground bounded by gate, stonewall, and hedge sit the church, manse, stables, graveyard, garden, and meadows. Below the Water of Leith bends its brown churning waters. On the one side of the garden is the church, symbol of convention and constraint, a bounded vision of omnipresent sin and repentance. Beyond the hedge and stone boundaries is the wild current of river, leading to the city, and beyond that, to the sea and lands of foreign peoples and practices. To find the way through the hedge was to unlock the constricted geography of Calvinism, to step out of the shadow of the steepled church above and find freedom from convention and debilitating shame.

A Child’s Garden of Verses begins with the dedication to Alison Cunningham “from her boy.” Here are the first ten lines:

For the long nights you lay awake

And watched for my unworthy sake:

For your most comfortable hand

That led me through the uneven land:

For all the story-books you read:

For all the pains you comforted:

For all you pitied, all you bore,

In sad and happy days of yore:—

My second Mother, my first Wife,

The angel of my infant life—

Stevenson immediately establishes in this dedication that the child’s world to be depicted in the following poems is not going to be the exclusive idyll of Kate Greenaway’s verses. Here is a child who was “unworthy,” “pitied,” and who somehow generated burdens that his nurse “bore,” including long nights of lying awake. Childhood was indeed an uneven land with sad days vanquishing happy ones. Also, a bit awkward, but not surprising, is his sobriquet, “my first Wife,” for Cummy. This might indeed be startling, if we did not know about his repetitive pattern of fusing mother/lover imagery in his relationships with Frances Sitwell, Madame Garschine (the older Russian woman from Menton), and Fanny.

In his words to Cummy, we re-enter the world of Stevenson’s earliest nuclear script—the sickly child, in a sleepless night of moral struggle, looking to storybooks and a nurturing older female for support. This lays out the basic template for the poems to follow. And the poems deliver multiple variations on this theme—a kind of fugue that takes us to all the various possibilities of childhood: joy, terror, and discovery.

The first poem, “Bed in Summer,” sets up a key contrast—the Heriot Row bedroom and the bustling world outside. Here the bedroom is not depicted in its typical way, as a source of rest, but rather a space imposed upon the child, while the adults still move about and the sun has yet to set.

And does it not seem hard to you,

When all the sky is clear and blue,

And I should like so much to play

To have to go to bed by day?

Who is the “you” being addressed in this first poem of the book? Is it another child caught

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