Q1.
I. You must have read poems and songs related to childhood fascination about different vocations in English and in your own language. Now, read and enjoy the poem given below.
The Lamplighter
My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;
It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
For every night at tea-time and before you take your seat;
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.
Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,
And my papa’s a banker and as rich as he can be;
But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I’m to do,
O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you!
For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;
And O! before you jurry by with ladder and with light,
O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night!
— R.L. Stevenson
Answer
What the poem says. A small child, kept indoors and waiting for tea, watches at the window every evening for Leerie, the man who goes down the street with a ladder and a lantern lighting the gas lamps. Other people have grand plans — Tom will drive, Maria will go to sea, and the child’s own father is a banker “as rich as he can be”. The child wants none of that. When he is stronger and free to choose, he will go round at night lighting lamps with Leerie. In the last stanza he asks only one thing: that Leerie, hurrying past with his ladder, should look up and nod to him.
How Stevenson makes it work.
- Form. Three four-line stanzas, rhyming aabb (sky/by, seat/street; sea/be, do/you; door/more, light/night). The long, swinging lines have a regular beat, so the poem moves at the pace of a man walking steadily up a street.
- The child’s voice is kept intact. “It’s time to take the window” is a child’s phrase, not an adult’s; so is “when I am stronger”, which measures growing up in strength rather than in years.
- Contrast carries the meaning. Driver, sailor, banker — three ambitions are named and set aside in four lines, and the humblest job of all is chosen instead. The child does not want to be rich; he wants to be the man who brings light.
- The ending is the finest touch. The whole poem builds up to a request that costs nothing: “see a little child and nod to him to-night!” To be noticed by the person you admire is the child’s entire ambition.
Why the book prints it here. Both poems in this chapter honour work that nobody applauds. ‘Gifts of Grace’ says it directly — the electrician who works “with cables and wires to brighten our lives”. Stevenson says it through a child at a window, and lands on the same idea: the lamplighter is worth more to that street than the banker is. Notice too that Leerie’s job no longer exists; gas lamps have gone. The poem is now also a record of a vanished vocation, which is exactly the anxiety Galsworthy’s ‘Quality’ and Temsula Ao’s story raise.
A printing slip worth noticing: line 11 in the book reads “before you jurry by”. Stevenson’s original word is hurry — and ‘hurry’ is what the sense and the rhythm both require. Read it as ‘hurry’.