{
 "id": "robert-louis-stevenson/youth-and-love-i",
 "title": "Youth and Love⁠—I",
 "ordinal": "I",
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "Robert Louis Stevenson",
 "poet_slug": "robert-louis-stevenson",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Songs of Travel and Other Verses",
 "book_slug": "songs-of-travel",
 "book_kind": "volume",
 "sequence": 2,
 "container": null,
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1896,
  "venue": "Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)",
  "note": "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.",
  "uncertain": true,
  "sources": [
   "https://archive.org/details/songsoftraveloth00stevrich"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/robert-louis-stevenson_poetry",
  "file": "poetry.xhtml",
  "upstream": [
   "https://archive.org/details/worksofrobertlvol28stev",
   "https://archive.org/details/worksofrobertlou14stev",
   "https://archive.org/details/newpoemsandvaria00stevuoft",
   "https://archive.org/details/poemshithertounp00stevrich",
   "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31291",
   "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30659",
   "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/441",
   "https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems,_by_Robert_Louis_Stevenson,_hitherto_unpublished"
  ],
  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-20"
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 16,
  "n_stanzas": 4,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 39,
  "max_indent": 1
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Once only by the garden gate",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Our lips were joined and parted.",
    "indent": 1
   },
   {
    "text": "I must fulfil an empty fate",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And travel the uncharted.",
    "indent": 1
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Hail and farewell! I must arise,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Leave here the fatted cattle,",
    "indent": 1
   },
   {
    "text": "And paint on foreign lands and skies",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "My Odyssey of battle.",
    "indent": 1
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "The untented Kosmos my abode,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I pass, a wilful stranger:",
    "indent": 1
   },
   {
    "text": "My mistress still the open road",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And the bright eyes of danger.",
    "indent": 1
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Come ill or well, the cross, the crown,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The rainbow or the thunder,",
    "indent": 1
   },
   {
    "text": "I fling my soul and body down",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "For God to plough them under.",
    "indent": 1
   }
  ]
 ]
}