22 pages • 44-minute read
Requiem
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Themes
The Consolation of Nature
The poem is staged beneath a wide and starry night sky. The poet invites the reader, terrified over the idea of mortality and the grim ritual of interment in the ground, to stand beneath the sky, to open up to nature’s still, loving presence, and to conceive of death as a return to that animated cosmos.
In an era in which science systematically sought to disenchant nature and render it as little more than a bland and indifferent complex of laws and predictable processes, the poem celebrates the ancient, mystical consolation of nature as a living thing that will not accept death as the final word. The poem, after all, is about the ritual of burial, itself a process that for millennia has recreated symbolically the return of the body to the embrace of the earth, a satisfying cycle that makes burial itself a kind of homecoming. The poem argues that the process of interment is neither grim nor gothic. Burial restores a person to the open embrace of nature itself. Biography tempts—Stevenson himself would instruct that he be buried along the slope of a volcano on a remote South Sea island, the very manifestation of the idea of nature as consolation in the event of death. The poet here, however, is not dead, not even dying. The poem is more a how-to set of instructions to ensure that when the person does die, that the burial is less a grim farewell and more a welcome home, a return to nature. The poet, after all, envisions his grave beneath a “wide and starry sky” (Line 1), that is a part of nature at its most inviting, its most expansive, and its most welcoming. Thematically, the poem opens up. The poet directs the focus less on the narrow and claustrophobic grave and more in spreading above the hole a fetching canopy of stars that dwarfs the grave into insignificance. The night is hardly the cliché Gothic terror-scape but rather a beautiful, gentle sky spangled with a generous plash of stars.
The Conditional Acceptance of Death
The poet describes the grave as home—the thought might suggest the poem encourages death, promotes morbid thinking, counsels the welcome quiet of the grave. As such it would be a dangerous poem as it might make death seem comforting. Death, the poem says, is only a comfort for a person who has engaged the world at full throttle. The poem certainly accepts the reality of death. The poem investigates how a person, without resorting to the consolations of an afterlife, needs to accept the reality of death but only on condition. Far from a morbid poem that might make death seem intoxicating, even alluring, the poem sees death as an absolute parameter and that ignoring it or pretending it away with fairy tales about angels and demons only cheapens the relatively brief span of time that defines any person’s life. The poet seems calm, even nonchalant and matter-of-fact about his own death. That is not because he abandons life easily or embraces death unthinkingly. The poem suggests the conditional acceptance of the reality of death is directly related to the willingness of a person to live knowing that death is a reality, an event on the horizon that is ever approaching. Death is a dark threat only to those who live bound by regret, defined by limits, and satisfied too simply, too easily, too quickly. Death is not some final exam that a person, suddenly panicking, can cram for at the last minute.
That is why the biographical factoid that Stevenson first drafted the poem when he had just turned 30 is telling. The poem is a preemptive prescription designed to remedy against a mid-life crisis, those doldrum years in which a person caves in to overwhelming regret and a sense of lost chances. The poem is a cautionary note from the poet to the poet to never abandon the hunger for experience that had defined his anything-but-conservative lifestyle since he completed and then summarily abandoned his law practice to see the world that never stopped enthralling him. The poem is not a look back, perhaps expected in a poem titled “Requiem,” but rather it is a bold and sweeping look ahead, a visionary reminder that only the fullest and richest life lived will render death a welcome home. The poet contemplates his death, certainly, but while doing so, he still has the time and the emotional momentum to make his life, whatever its duration, an adventure.
The Role of the Poet
The poem, for all its apparent funereal touches, defines the role of the poet as a repository of moral and ethical guidance, a public figure engaged in the business of elevating the art of living, not the act of dying. Drawing from the traditional conception of the figure of the minister and from the new concepts of scientists as relentless observers of the world, Stevenson here manifests his belief in the poet as a moral light, aware of the realities of the world but as well gifted with a broader compassion. The center of the poem is not the poet and his careful instructions for his burial and for his gravesite marker. The moral center of the poem is the reader. The poet speaks to the reader to promote a better perception on living day to day. Encouraged by the exponential mid-century growth in the printing industry and the concomitant commitment to middle-class education and to literacy, poetry during the High Victorian era realized the reach of an audience through the explosion of journals and magazines and newspapers. For Stevenson, a writer was not bonding intimately with a reader through the vehicle of language. The poet was not using poetry to work through individual emotional crises or to share narrow perceptions.
Rather the poet was a teacher and verses were perceived best used as vehicles for instruction and as guideposts for right behavior. Here the poem reminds the reader, gently and without lecturing, of the reality of death, and at the same time offering the consolation that death will be welcome if life was lived gladly and fully. By modern standards, of course, the psychology of such optimism can seem thin and cliché, sentimental and hackneyed. Indeed, the idea of the poet as inspirational figure has been downgraded, even at times into the carefully metered, carefully rhymed sayings in greeting cards. Stevenson embraced the job of the poet to instill if not right thinking (that was part of an outdated and abused religious culture). The outcome was at least better living and by extension better dying.
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