Requiem -- Robert Louis Stevenson

(Poem #20) Requiem 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

This poem more or less speaks for itself; it was inscribed on Stevenson's
gravestone as an epitaph. RLS is a lot better known for his marvellous
romances, such as Treasure Island and Kidnapped; though I'd hesitate to
call his poetry 'brilliant', it is nonetheless well-written and enjoyable,
with simple but nicely rhythmic and often surprisingly memorable phrases.

The penultimate line is often given as 'home from _the_ sea'; while I have
no idea which is the correct version, I prefer the one above.

Biographical Note:

  [Stevenson] had shown a desire to write early in life, and once in his
  teens he had deliberately set out to learn the writer's craft by imitating
  a great variety of models in prose and verse. His youthful enthusiasm for
  the Covenanters (i.e., those Scotsmen who banded together to defend their
  version of Presbyterianism in the 17th century) led to his writing The
  Pentland Rising, his first printed work. During his years at the
  university he rebelled against his parents' religion and set himself up as
  a liberal bohemian who abhorred the alleged cruelties and hypocrisies of
  bourgeois respectability.
  [...]
  Stevenson was frequently abroad, most often in France. Two of his journeys
  produced An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes
  (1879). His career as a writer developed slowly.
  [...]
  It was these early essays, carefully wrought, quizzically meditative in
  tone, and unusual in sensibility, that first drew attention to Stevenson
  as a writer.
        -- Encyclopaedia Britannica

Criticism:

  Stevenson's literary reputation has also fluctuated. The reaction against
  him set in soon after his death: he was considered a mannered and
  imitative essayist or only a writer of children's books. But eventually
  the pendulum began to swing the other way, and by the 1950s his reputation
  was established among the more discerning as a writer of originality and
  power; whose essays at their best are cogent and perceptive renderings of
  aspects of the human condition; whose novels are either brilliant
  adventure stories with subtle moral overtones or original and impressive
  presentations of human action in terms of history and topography as well
  as psychology; whose short stories produce some new and effective
  permutations in the relation between romance and irony or manage to
  combine horror and suspense with moral diagnosis; whose poems, though not
  showing the highest poetic genius, are often skillful, occasionally (in
  his use of Scots, for example) interesting and original, and sometimes (in
  A Child's Garden) valuable for their exhibition of a special kind of
  sensibility.
        -- E.B.

Martin