The echoing bridge you here may see, The pouring lynn, the waving tree, The eager angler fresh from town— Above, the contumelious clown. The angler plies his line and rod, The clodpole stands with many a nod— With many a nod and many a grin, He sees him cast his engine in.
“What have you caught?” the peasant cries.
“Nothing as yet,” the Fool replies.
Where this text comes from
First published in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Appendix (1898). This date is uncertain. Taken from the 1898 Appendix volume of the Edinburgh Edition. For most of these verses that is not the first printing: the volume reproduces in facsimile the Davos Press cuts and rhymes that Stevenson wrote and engraved between the autumn of 1880 and the summer of 1882 and that his stepson Lloyd Osbourne printed at the time. The volume's own bibliographical note states that only the two Moral Tales, 'Robin and Ben' and 'The Builder's Doom', are printed here for the first time. Which Davos booklet printed a given rhyme, and in what year, is not established here. [1]
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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–#L10.
Cite this poem
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894).
“The Angler & The Clown.” First published in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Appendix (1898).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/robert-louis-stevenson/the-angler-the-clown/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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