Greetings, Poetry (& Halloween) Lovers!
To celebrate this particular season of the year (my favorite), I thought a little 'grave' poetry was in order. So here is something by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894):
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.
Lilting and lovely for a weighty subject, isn't it? (Learn more about RLS here.)
This poem was penned in 1890, and our dear poet requested it be inscribed on his tombstone. On December 3, 1894, Stevenson collapsed and died, possibly suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. Born in Edinburgh, he had traveled quite a bit and had moved his family to Samoa four or five years before his death. He is buried in a tomb at Mt. Vaea, where he had built a beautiful estate, and the poem is indeed inscribed there.
At this online site of the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum there, you can peek into the rooms of the mansion he built (restored after storm damage in the 1990s), enjoy the lush vistas, and see the tomb upon which those lines above are inscribed.
[Photo/studio aside... Every day or two this month I've been posting "October Offerings" on my artsylettersgifts Instagram, - & would love some more followers! The bookmark featured with Stevenson's poem above includes a snippet of a Victorian illustration from 1869, when our poet would have been 19 years old. :0) ]
And speaking of beautiful people with South Pacific connections, our one and only Jama is rounding up Poetry Friday this week at Jama's Alphabet Soup! I'm sure Mr. Cornelius is helping. I recently purchased her Hawai'ian story, THE WOMAN IN THE MOON, simply because I didn't have it, and I love folktales! Here's a link to Jama's Amazon page in case you need a copy of DUMPLING SOUP or TRUMAN'S ANT FARM. Jama's writing in any form is timeless!
Note: After our 35th Furman reunion this weekend (!) I'll be frolicking/working hard just north of Atlanta doing author school visits for Cobb EMC/Gas South's Literacy Week. So this post will still be up next Friday. The host for Poetry Friday NEXT week will be the lovely Karen Edmisten. I hope to catch up on my own Poetry Friday rounding/reading during downtime in the hotel next week! :0)
Thanks for coming by.