New Poems and Variant Readings

Robert Louis Stevenson · 1918

Witness is the 1918 Chatto & Windus edition (University of Toronto copy), lines 415-5820, which is the text proper; the preface and contents are excluded. 128 poems were assigned from it on 2026-08-21. The 129th, Air of Diabelli's, was placed by hand the same day, because the witness shows it and the scorer could not: it scored 0.55 against a threshold of 0.60. The poem is printed as a set of variant readings, so several of its lines recur two and three times over its five pages — “Berried brake and reedy island”, “Through the sky's inverted image”, “Dear were your eyes as the day” — and core.body_score advances its cursor to the highest-ratio match rather than the earliest acceptable one, so a later repeat takes the cursor past the intervening lines. Single variant words stand on lines of their own between the verses in this printing (azure, warbles), which breaks the run further. What the witness does show is the whole poem: the contents leaf lists AIR OF DIABELLI'S at page 128, the heading stands over the first line at that page, the running head carries the title through pages 129 and 131, and the closing line matches this text. The threshold was not lowered. Only membership is by hand; tools/books.py order gave the poem its position from the same witness, like every other. The poems this volume shares with Underwoods, Ballads and Songs of Travel were already placed in those first editions and were not considered here.