Good old ale, mild or pale, India ale and Burton, Give me a vat to swim a whale. When far along the verdant dale The far off spire appears, The mind reverts to Burton’s ale And dreams of different beers.
Where this text comes from
First published in Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson (Hitherto Unpublished) (1921). The volume's title page states that these poems were hitherto unpublished, and no earlier printing of them has been established. The 1921 date is the year of first printing, but not necessarily of this exact copy: the volume states that it is a complimentary edition struck from the same type forms as the Bibliophile Society's edition of the same year. [1]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-20.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/robert-louis-stevenson_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (8)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L7.
Cite this poem
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894).
“Good Old Ale, Mild or Pale.” First published in Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson (Hitherto Unpublished) (1921).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/robert-louis-stevenson/good-old-ale-mild-or-pale/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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