Requiem

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 long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.


One part of our homeschool curriculum is memorizing poetry. That always goes better when my 9 year old son chooses the poem. He was enraptured by this one when he heard John Wayne recite it in a movie he watched with his dad. We let him stay up too late last night and watch the A&E movie based on John McCain's autobiographical Faith of My Fathers, where the poem appears again. Today he was tired and a little cranky from staying up too late, but no less enthusiastic about the poem -- or the movie. He'll have the poem memorized in a day or two, but I'll be answering his questions about POW's for quite some time.