Dreamlike Echoes of a Vagabond Life in Edinburgh

In this lyrical essay, Emre Aracı returns to Edinburgh—once his student home—for a fleeting yet deeply poetic sojourn, where memory, music, and place entwine. Prompted by a chance encounter with "The Nutcracker" ballet and the frost-laced beauty of the Georgian New Town, Aracı finds himself tracing quiet resonances between his own past and the lives of kindred spirits: Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Schubert, Ralph Vaughan Williams. From the old lamplight of Heriot Row to the healing stillness of St Bernard’s Well, the essay becomes a meditative journey through time, art, and inner landscape. Along the way, it uncovers unexpected echoes—between Scotland and Samoa, Schubert and Stevenson, music and poetry—that reveal the gentle, recurring motif of the vagabond soul: ever searching, ever returning, and ever moved by the quiet miracle of beauty.

At times, I find myself wondering whether it is my columns in the Andante magazine that shape my life, or rather my life that moulds the sentences I pen therein. Indeed, scarcely had I written the final full stop of my article on The Nutcracker—published in the February issue of Andante—when I found myself, quite unexpectedly, in the historic capital of Scotland, Edinburgh, for a brief sojourn of two days.

"I found myself, quite unexpectedly, in Edinburgh" (photo © Emre ARACI)

Upon arriving and stepping into the nocturnal hush of that enchanting city—whose streets I once called home during my student years at 53 Frederick Street, and which I have recounted on numerous occasions within these very pages—I encountered, quite serendipitously, The Nutcracker once again. Its advertisement gleamed from the glass window of the Festival Theatre: “costumes as if plucked from the most dazzling chocolate box, Tchaikovsky’s music transporting you to a land of dreams, and a tale drawn from the pages of a classic fairytale.”¹

"Tchaikovsky’s music transporting you to a land of dreams"

The following evening, I took my seat amongst the audience and watched as the principal dancer of Covent Garden, Nicol Edmonds, embodied the Nutcracker in a flawless production by the Scottish Ballet. The architectural grandeur of the city itself seemed to serve as a natural stage set for this ballet. In that moment, it felt as though I had not concluded my previous article with a full stop, but rather a semicolon—and that I was now continuing to heed the dreamlike echoes of truth and life itself, finding my way anew through those very sounds. This sensation brought with it a profound inner reckoning, an interplay wherein life informed art and art, in turn, caressed life—blurring the boundaries between the two in an experience steeped in poetic resonance and aesthetic sensibility, where the present moment intertwined with the past.

View from the Royal Scots Club (© Emre ARACI)

The next morning, as I drew back the curtains of my second-floor room at the Royal Scots Club—housed within a historic building on Abercromby Place, erected in 1800—I beheld a scene of spellbinding beauty. The Queen Street Gardens opposite, frozen in the grip of the previous night’s bitter frost, had been transformed into a tableau reminiscent of The Nutcracker’s Snow Kingdom. This enchanting vision, framed by the unspoilt classical symmetry of the New Town’s Georgian architecture and crowned by the spire of St Andrew’s and St George’s Church rising in silhouette above the distant rooftops, evoked nothing less than the stage of a ballet.

“I love this city and I always will. I write about it. I dream about it. I walk its streets and see something new every day: the faint traces of half-erased inscriptions on stone; a façade I had passed many times but never truly seen; a doorway engraved with the names of those who lived there sixty years ago, commemorated on a brass plate that goes unnoticed by all,” writes Sir Alexander McCall Smith in A Work of Beauty², his lovingly illustrated homage to Edinburgh. During this brief visit I had the pleasure of meeting Sir Alexander, whom Turkish readers may recognise from his 44 Scotland Street series, translated into our language. Those novels are set in a bohemian and bustling corner of Edinburgh where members of the old bourgeoisie find themselves living cheek-by-jowl with students, poets, and portrait painters.

On that winter’s morning, cold enough to turn the city into a snowbound kingdom, I stepped out of Abercromby Place and wandered along Heriot Row. As I did so, I found myself reading the faint inscriptions on the city’s stones as though they were the verses of ancient epigraphs—just as McCall Smith had described. For Edinburgh is not merely a physical place; it is a motif that threads itself through the fabric of one’s life, a perpetual trove of discovery.

Lost in thought as I walked through Heriot Row that morning, my eye was caught by a brass plaque affixed to one of the gas lamps—now converted to electric—perched atop the iconic black iron railings that encircle the New Town’s buildings. The inscription was a quotation from a poem entitled The Lamplighter, describing a young child’s wonder and admiration for a lamplighter named Leerie, who lit the streetlamps each evening.³ The final stanza of that poem brought me to a stop outside number 17, a house with a crimson door. The poet, none other than Robert Louis Stevenson—the immortal author of Treasure Island—had lived here from the age of six until 1880.

"My eye was was caught by a brass plaque at 17 Heriot Row" (photo © Emre ARACI)

Within the twilight of those childhood evenings, Stevenson had glimpsed in Leerie’s task the quiet heroism of ordinary things, as though the man were lighting stars in the heavens. For Stevenson, it was a symbol of hope—a flame in the darkness. And Leerie, in turn, illuminated not only the streets but the burgeoning landscape of Stevenson’s imagination. Encountering his words in such a tangible way, amidst the poetry of a simple walk, struck a chord within me.

Plagued throughout his youth by ill health, Stevenson was drawn to travel and to writing. Though he studied law at the University of Edinburgh, he chose the path of literature, and became one of the most beloved writers of the nineteenth century, with his novels, essays, and poetry. In his final years, he settled in the Samoan Islands, whose climate benefited his health, and where he came to be known affectionately as “Tusitala” — the teller of tales. “There are no foreign lands,” he once wrote. “It is the traveller only who is foreign.”⁴ Though he passed away in Samoa at the age of forty-four, in Heriot Row he still seemed curiously alive.

With the light kindled in my heart that day, I began to delve into Stevenson’s life and other verses of his poetry. It was then that I encountered The Vagabond—a poem that speaks with arresting clarity of a solitary soul yearning for a life immersed in nature. Embracing hardship and uncertainty, it exalts the peace and contentment afforded by a life unshackled from society’s demands. It opens with lines that stir the spirit:

“Give to me the life I love,

Let the lave go by me,

Give the jolly heaven above

And the byway nigh me.”⁵

At the head of the poem’s manuscript, Stevenson had written: “To An Air of Schubert.”⁶ It is evident from this inscription that he had composed the poem under the spell of a Schubert lied. Over the years, the librarian J. F. M. Russell of Northwestern University in Chicago gathered more than 173 compositions and arrangements by Stevenson, who began composing unexpectedly in his mid-thirties.

Russell studied The Vagabond closely and identified the Schubert song that inspired it as Mut! (“Courage”), the twenty-second lied in the Winterreise cycle.⁷ The connection was first proposed, without evidence, by the Canadian writer John Murray Gibbon in 1934 and later confirmed by Russell’s deciphering of Stevenson’s manuscript. The connection is compelling: Schubert’s vigorous and defiant tone finds its echo in the passionate, rhythmically insistent lines of Stevenson’s verse.

Thus began for me a poetic journey—sparked by a morning walk in Edinburgh—whose enchantment I had not anticipated. Yet, as though guided by a shared wanderlust, this reverie led me to an unexpected but profoundly moving destination. Having traced Stevenson’s footsteps back to Schubert’s Winterreise, I now found myself drawn irresistibly into the sound-world of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Vaughan Williams, too, had fallen under the spell of Stevenson’s poetry. Inspired by the same collection—Songs of Travel and Other Verses—he composed a song cycle of that name between 1901 and 1904, suffused with pastoral elegance and deep inner resonance.⁸ Subtle allusions to Schubert’s Winterreise abound, yet Vaughan Williams’s voice is unmistakably his own: English in temperament, solitary in spirit, and noble in utterance.

Ralph Vaughan Williams by Gerald Festus Kelly (© Royal College of Music) 

Musicologist William M. Adams notes that the narrative arc of Songs of Travel emerges not from Stevenson’s arrangement of the poems, but from Vaughan Williams’s musical ordering. “The central character is ‘The Vagabond’, introduced in the first song. A young man eager to cast off the comforts of home and forge his own path. He asks nothing but the road and the sky above, daring fate and nature alike. He will make do with bread dampened by the river and seek no wealth, no affection, no companionship.”⁹

Though the world he sings of is stripped of prosperity, hope, love or fellowship, Vaughan Williams’s Vagabond desires only the heavens and the open road. He later orchestrated several of the songs—originally for baritone and piano—and they are now also performed by tenors. I personally favour the recording by James Gilchrist for Chandos, whose tone recalls Ian Bostridge’s Winterreise in its delicate hues. Listening to it, I was reminded of one of my old articles for Andante, published in issue no. 148 (February 2019), entitled “A Winter Journey in the Desert with Schubert.” In these subtle correspondences, one begins to read life’s messages—and sense the quiet closing of a circle.

With these thoughts in mind, I made my way from Heriot Row down towards the banks of the Water of Leith, the frozen ground beneath my feet crackling with every step upon its two-hundred-year-old cobblestones. I was heading, almost instinctively, towards St Bernard’s Well—designed in 1789 by Alexander Nasmyth atop a healing spring. 

During my student years, I had often spent Sunday afternoons reading beside its elegant rotunda, where the statue of Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health, looked down with a gentle smile. On that frozen morning, she greeted me once again with the same timeless serenity.

"Hygeia greeted me with the same timeless serenity" (photo © Emre ARACI)

In his book on Edinburgh, Stevenson wrote, “This city holds a tie upon the hearts of its people; wherever they go, they find no city of such a kind; wherever they go, they take pride in their old homes.”¹⁰ With Schubert and Vaughan Williams still echoing in my ears, I recalled my own former home at 53 Frederick Street and thought to myself—yes, this must indeed be the dreamlike echo of a vagabond life in Edinburgh.

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Footnotes

1. Promotional text from the Scottish Ballet’s Nutcracker (2024), Festival Theatre, Edinburgh.

2. Sir Alexander McCall Smith, A Work of Beauty: Alexander McCall Smith’s Edinburgh (Birlinn, 2014).

3. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lamplighter, in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885).

4. R. L. Stevenson, from The Silverado Squatters (1883).

5. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Vagabond, in Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896).

6. Stevenson’s annotation: “To An Air of Schubert,” from the manuscript of The Vagabond.

7. Franz Schubert, Winterreise, D.911, No. 22: Mut!

8. Ralph Vaughan Williams, Songs of Travel, settings of Stevenson’s poetry (1901–04).

9. William M. Adams, “A Narrative in Song: Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel,” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, no. 25 (October 2002).

10. Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1878).

Emre Aracı's article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Edinburgh’da gezgin bir hayatın hülyalı akisleri’ in the March 2025 issue (No. 221) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

© Emre Aracı 2025. All rights reserved.
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