Google has reminded me that today was the 160th anniversary of Robert Louis Stevenson’s birth. I think my grandmother introduced me to him, reading A Child’s Garden of Verses to me when I was small—and of course I read Treasure Island. But I’ve always loved this poem, which I still hear with memory’s ear in the old-fashioned Sidney Homer setting that was my introduction to it as a young singer. I looked for a performance online but failed to find one. I’ll keep looking, and if I find it I’ll post a link.
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 long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
The poem has inspired various writers, not the least being William Humphrey, whose 1958 novel, Home from the Hill, is a minor masterpiece that became the source of a pretty good film by Vincente Minnelli. I heard Humphrey talk about Home from the Hill and other things not long before he died. He seemed a shy man, not unlike Stevenson. It was a good talk.