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Lizzie MacGregor on 'Songs of Travel X'

This short poem by Robert Louis Stevenson is very dear to my heart. It is hard not to respond positively to its message, so light-handedly does Stevenson deliver it.

At first glance airy and charming, but read it over, and again, and you see that the whole sweep of fate and chance is illuminated through the simple pieces of nature we love in our small lives - surely the best way we can conceive of the infinite.

We must take the whole package, in order to find in our lives that 'symphony': accept misfortunes - the stones in our path; and live with imperfections - the brambles in the garden (though as a gardener I find this bit difficult!). It seems to us a very modern concept - holistic, harmonious - and how green the admonition that we should change nothing 'of the things that are'. It's a good philosophy for life. Read this at my funeral.

About Lizzie MacGregor

Lizzie has been a lover of poetry since she was twelve, a librarian since she was twenty-one, and has been at the Scottish Poetry Library since 1993, happily combining professional practice and personal preference. Lizzie's initial Library training was with Lanarkshire County Libraries, and a degree in Librarianship at Strathclyde University was followed by a post as cataloguer at Edinburgh University Library. At the SPL, as well as cataloguing and indexing, Lizzie looks after the periodicals collection and answers reference enquiries.

Lizzie MacGregor is the editor of several anthologies of poems for important occasions: Handsel: Scottish poems for welcoming and naming babies; Handfast: Scottish poems for weddings and affirmations and Lament: Scottish poems for funerals and consolation, as well as an anthology of poems about Edinburgh, Luckenbooth, all published by Polygon.

Songs of Travel X

I know not how it is with you -
       I love the first and last,
The whole field of the present view,
       The whole flow of the past.

One tittle of the things that are,
       Nor you should change nor I -
One pebble in our path - one star
       In all our heaven of sky.

Our lives, and every day and hour,
       One symphony appear:
One road, one garden - every flower
       And every bramble dear.

Robert Louis Stevenson

from Songs of Travel. First published 1895.

About this poem

The poems in Songs of Travel were written during the last year of Stevenson's life, in Samoa. For a description of the poems' editing and posthumous publication, read the account by Roger C Lewis in The Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson (EUP, 2003).

Image: Reader, New York © Robin Gray