Sunday, January 26, 2014

Robert Louis Stevenson - Poetry

I know Robert Louis Stevenson only as a novelist and not a poet.  This particular poem is called 'Requiem' and was apparently used as epitaph on his own tomb.

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 long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

What a nice little poem!  'Glad did I live and gladly die/And I laid me down with a will'.  I can only hope that I can face the end with such composure. The ending phrases get me too.  'Home is the sailor, home from the sea,/And the hunter home from the hill'.  I'm neither a hunter or a sailor, but those phrases strike at something.
I like it. 

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