Poem of the week: Bright is the Ring of Words by Robert Louis Stevenson
Bright is the Ring of Words
Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them,
Fair the fall of songs
When the singer sings them.
Still they are carolled and said –
On wings they are carried –
After the singer is dead
And the maker is buried.
Low as the singer lies
In the field of heather,
Songs of his fashion bring
The swains together.
And when the west is red
With the sunset embers,
The lover lingers and sings
And the maid remembers.
A contemporary ringing of bright words, Peter Gizzi’s poem Song, discussed here a couple of weeks ago, reminded me to revisit Robert Louis Stevenson and test the mettle of a Victorian classic.
Bright is the Ring of Words was first published in 1896, in Songs of Travel and Other Verses. That edition indents every other line, emphasising the melody of the alternating masculine/feminine line-endings and making “the ring of words” a visibly interlocking pattern.
The meaning of the noun “ring” pairs sound and image, and “bright” is a perfectly chosen adjective for both, applicable to the “ring” as a resonant sound and to the “ring” as physical shape, a band you might wear, a circlet of lit water, even the sentence structure which, in line 2, returns to “ring” as a verb. The first two lines have a beautifully sharp, bright ring, their assonance and internal rhyme enhanced by the trimeter’s swiftness and “bounce”.
Stevenson is surely thinking of poems as well as songs when he writes: “Still they are carried and said.” Songs may be said, but rather exceptionally, by those learning them, collecting them, copying or printing them. An old-fashioned message about the power of art to outlast its maker is contained in the ring of the relationship of the poem and its writer: the latter’s steely confidence in the survival of his words comes clearly across. Stevenson loves his own music, and punctuates it finely. That use of the dash at the ends of lines 5 and 6, for instance, adds extra force to his assertion: the songs are not just “carolled” and not merely “carried” – but “on wings they are carried”.
The last octet may give us pause, not only because of the slightly sentimental tinge to the imagery and diction. It reminds us that popularity matters, and we may go on to reflect that poems are probably rarely as effective as songs these days in bringing swains together and sparking memories in the old. The point Stevenson’s last stanza makes is that the work of art, song or poem, has to find an emotional response in its hearers if it’s to be “carried”. They are the providers of the wings.
I’ve often heard Bright is the Ring of Words sung, especially in Vaughan Williams’s setting. But I registered it freshly as printed text not so long ago when leafing through the collection, A Year of Scottish Poems. First published in 2018, this is an excellently varied and unpatronising anthology for children, with one poem for each day of the year chosen by Gaby Morgan, and a foreword by Jackie Kay. I was surprised at how much impact Bright is the Ring of Words still exerted, despite the vibrant company of other classics and many fine contemporary poems, how good it was simply as a poem. An untarnished golden oldie? I think so, and its own song still lifts from the page, and carries.
