Requiem

"R. L. S." by A. E. Housman (1894)

Published just weeks after Stevenson’s death, Housman, a poet in his own right and a close friend and admirer of Stevenson’s work, in this brief, but exquisite lyric gently, lovingly riffs on “Requiem” itself, drawing on its most famous closing lines. The poem, more melancholic in tone that Stevenson’s original, suggests Stevenson’s notion of the grave as a welcome rest for those whose spirit has relished its time on earth makes at best bittersweet the hard reality of his own death.

"A Child’s Garden of Verses" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)

There is perhaps no better introduction to Stevenson as poet. One of the most popular and most beloved anthologies of Victorian England, Stevenson captures the delightful marvels of the ordinary backyard world of growing up by developing each poem from the perspective of a naïve, wide-eyed child learning about the world in a rich immediacy. Although Stevenson opted not to include “Requiem” because its topic would be inappropriate for such a collection, reading the lyrics here helps develop a keener ear for Stevenson’s subtle and often playful sense of rhyme and his careful sculpting of his lines into traditional meter.

"When I Am Dear, Dearest" by Christina Rossetti (1848); "Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam" by Ernest Dowson (1896)

Poems about grief and death became something of a genre in Neo-Romantic British poetry. These two examples show how easily such a topic would lend itself to morbid treatment and to an extravagant sense of despair and hopelessness. In Rossetti’s poem, the recently-departed speaks from the grave and acknowledges that soon she will be entirely forgotten as if she never lived. The Dowson poem draws on the epigraph from Horace to argue that given life’s cruel brevity there is no cause for hope. Stevenson’s poem works in the opposite temper, seeing in the reality of death an urgent reason to live fully and gladly.