The morning drum-call on my eager ear Thrills unforgotten yet; the morning dew Lies yet undried along my field of noon. But now I pause at whiles in what I do, And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear (My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon.
Where this text comes from
First published in Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896). This date is uncertain. Taken from the 1896 Chatto & Windus volume, the first separate edition. That is not the poems' first appearance: Sidney Colvin's prefatory note to this volume states that they had already been included in the Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson's works. Which printing came first, and in what year, has not been established here. [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–#L6.
Cite this poem
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894).
“The Morning Drum-Call on My Eager Ear.” First published in Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/robert-louis-stevenson/the-morning-drum-call-on-my-eager-ear/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
More by Robert Louis Stevenson