“A teller of tales,” by Richard Tillinghast (original) (raw)
Does my first memory of Robert Louis Stevenson’s work come from reading one of his stories or poems, or from hearing something of his read aloud? I am not sure I can answer my own question. Some of the lyrics from A Child’s Garden of Verses are familiar, whether they were read to me or I read them myself. Poems like “My Bed Is a Boat” and “The Land of Counterpane” strike a familiar chord for anyone who remembers being kept home from school with a cold or the flu.
My parents gave my brother and me a subscription to Marvel Classic Comics, and it was there I first encountered Stevenson’s adventure story Kidnapped. So it may well be that my first impression was visual. You will perhaps recall that when young David Balfour, an orphan, goes to his uncle’s house to seek assistance, his duplicitous relative sends him on an errand in the dark, up the stairs of his decrepit stone house. “I keep all my money in a chest in the tower at the far end of the house,” he says to his nephew. A thunderstorm is raging as David climbs the stairs in the dark:
Again the summer lightning came and went. This time I cried out—the passing brightness showed me that if I had taken one more step, I would have stepped where there was no stone and fallen to my death, for the stairs went no higher.
The thought
Richard Tillinghast’s fourteenth collection of poetry, Night Train to Memphis, is due from White Pine Press in 2025.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 43 Number 2, on page 39
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