A lyrical poem in three stanzas, dated August 1879, expressing a state of wandering contentment along two American rivers — the Susquehanna and the Delaware. The speaker embraces a philosophy of present-moment surrender, declaring indifference to the origins or destinations of his journey, finding sufficiency in the simple act of travelling through the natural landscapes of flood, field, hill, wood, and meadow that border these waterways. In the second stanza, the speaker reflects on a personal transformation, suggesting he has left behind former dreams and cherished thoughts from another time and place. He acknowledges having perhaps drunk too deeply of a figurative lotus — an allusion to the lotus-eaters of classical myth, symbolising a kind of forgetting or pleasurable numbness — implying that the American landscape has altered him fundamentally, dissolving his prior attachments and preoccupations. The final stanza strikes a more forward-looking and aspirational tone. The speaker expresses faith that God will eventually lead him onward to even brighter lands, where a fuller liberation awaits. Currently he feels himself only half realised — half a king — but anticipates a future state of complete spiritual freedom in which he will sing more boldly and carry himself with greater confidence than the somewhat subdued or altered figure he is at present beside these rivers. The poem balances tranquil acceptance of the immediate moment with an underlying restlessness and spiritual ambition, capturing a traveller caught between peaceful immersion in a foreign landscape and the yearning for an even greater becoming.
By Robert Louis Stevenson · Genre: Historical Fiction, Adventure, Travel Writing