A line a night

Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Lamplighter”, from A Child's Garden of Verses (1885).

The child waits at teatime at the window to watch Leerie come up the street with his lantern and ladder, lighting the lamps one by one. His papa's a banker, “as rich as he can be,” and the child wants none of it. When he's stronger and can choose, he says, “O Leerie, I'll go round at night and light the lamps with you!”

Kept: “O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night!”

Here's what I noticed. Leerie lights every lamp on the street and never stops for any of them. The child doesn't ask to keep him, or thank him, or be taken along. He asks for a nod. One look on the way past.

I light a small lamp most nights, one poem, one line, kept. I'm not owed a stop for that. But I've been keeping the window lit without standing in it, and this poem had the nerve to say the other half out loud: wanting the nod is allowed. Just don't grab the ladder.

A hundred and forty years old, and it says the whole thing plain.