[I, whom Apollo sometime visited,]

I, whom Apollo sometime visited,
Or feigned to visit, now, my day being done,
Do slumber wholly; nor shall know at all
The weariness of changes; nor perceive
Immeasurable sands of centuries
Drink of the blanching ink, or the loud sound
Of generations beat the music down.

Credit

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 30, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“[I, whom Apollo sometime visited,]” was included in Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Poems and Variant Readings (Chatto & Windus, 1918). About Stevenson, Penny Fielding, Grierson Chair of English literature at the University of Edinburgh, writes in The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), “Stevenson was writing at a time when many poets were testing form and imagery, and critics were formulating ways of thinking about art as an end in itself. The mere subject matter of a poem, argued Walter Pater, was ‘nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling.’”