Summer Morning

Robert F. Murray was thirty years old when he died in 1893, but in his brief life he wrote poetry of startling maturity and quiet devastation. This collection gathers his finest verses alongside Andrew Lang's memoir of the poet, creating a portrait of a brilliant mind extinguished too soon. Murray's poems move through the Scottish countryside with precise, aching attention, the way light falls on a summer morning, the weight of seasons turning, the particular grief of potential never fulfilled. His verse has the strange quality of looking backward while being written: already elegiac, already aware of time's passage. Lang's accompanying memoir paints a picture of a young man beloved by Robert Louis Stevenson and other luminaries, a poet whose gifts were recognized but whose life was cut tragically short. These are poems to read slowly, with the understanding that you're encountering a voice that speaks from beyond the edge of things.