”Requiem” Poem by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

Requiem is a gothic poem by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, published in the 1890 anthology: Underwoods.
It is a short, simple, and intensely musical poem.
The interesting thing about Requiem, apart from being one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s best poems, is that it was composed with a very definite purpose: to become his own epitaph.
In February 1880, an already ill Robert Louis Stevenson, but with more than a decade of life ahead of him, imagined his death.
And he not only imagined it, but he designed the words that would eventually be engraved on his tombstone.
Those prescient, austere, elegantly economical words make up a verse within the Requiem itself.

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894).

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