Readings · Poems
Requiem
Robert Louis Stevenson · 8 lines
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.
About this reading
Robert Louis Stevenson printed these eight lines as number XXI of Underwoods, the book of verse he published in 1887. The last three are the epitaph, set in italics. After his death in 1894 they were placed on his tomb in Samoa, in the words the book gives, as his biographer Graham Balfour records.
Underwoods sets the last three lines in italics, as the epitaph they are; they are in roman here. Its seventh line reads "Home is the sailor, home from sea," and the tomb carries the same words in Graham Balfour's Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.
- First published
- 1887
- Text from
- Underwoods, second edition (London, 1887)
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