A gale howls, rain drums on the window, and a man sits hunched with his elbows on his knees, counting the hours. Robert Louis Stevenson starts with a picture of loneliness, then spends the rest of the poem taking it back. Readers who know him from prose such as *Treasure Island* may be surprised by how quiet and private this voice is. There is no adventure here, only a chair, a pipe and a conversation with a friend.
The first stanza sets up the poem's pattern. The storm is outside, but inside there are crickets and a freshly lit pipe, small comforts that "cheer" him. Then comes a teasing understatement: "not all uncontested I sit." The chair is crowded. In the second stanza the Past sits "warm on my knee" like a gossiping companion, "charming to her and to me." Giving the Past a gender and a lap turns memory into company. The speaker corrects himself with a dramatic "Alone, did I say? O no, nowise alone", a flourish that sounds like speech rather than written verse. The Past is not simply sweet, though. It holds "much to be glad of and much to deplore," and the stanza ends on an odd, honest paradox: present sorrows may "seem more," yet they are "somehow more easy to bear." That "somehow" is telling. He cannot explain the comfort, only report it.
The third stanza turns to the Future, addressed as "thou," like a candle-flame. It is "faded," "uncertain and frail," a light he must protect "in each draught." The similes are far from cosy: a miner's lamp underground, a sail on a *raft*. A raft is a makeshift, precarious vessel, so the hope he describes belongs to people in danger who have no other choice. That makes the conclusion more convincing. Hope "can make feeble ones earnest and brave," and what he sees between now and "the grave" is "wonderful things to be done." He mentions the grave plainly, without gloom.
The final stanza states the creed: "To do or to try." If death calls early, he can leave his "foundations uprooted", a mixed image that merges house and plant, as though a settled life were something that could be pulled up and carried off. He pictures "some new city over the sea." Even failure is allowed for: "if Fortune go cross to my plan," he will mourn "the design" but "never lament for the man." The last line separates the project from the person. Plans may collapse, but his worth does not depend on them.
The form supports this mood. Each stanza has eight lines rhymed ABABCDCD, and the lines alternate between four and three beats, with a bouncing, anapaestic gallop: "The WIND is withOUT there and HOWLS in the TREES." That lilt is nearly jaunty and clashes with the lonely scene, as if the speaker were whistling against the weather. The rhymes are neat, though a few are loose. "Draught" and "raft" depend on how they are pronounced, and "on" and "done" are only a near match. These small looseness suits a speaker talking by the fire rather than performing.
The refrain "Believe me, my friend" appears five times, and nearly always before a "though" that admits a difficulty before answering it: though the evening draws in, though the sorrows seem more, though I mourn the design. The phrase makes the reader the friend in the other chair. It also shows that the optimism has been argued for, not just announced. Each stanza has its own subject, with present, past and future followed by a resolution, so the poem works like a small argument in four steps.
The poem matters because it presents courage as something modest and domestic. It is not a battlefield virtue but a decision made on a wet evening with a pipe in hand. Its claim, that effort and character outlast any failure, is simple, but the poem earns it by letting loneliness, doubt and death into the room first.