Robert Louis Stevenson - Requiem

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894

Robert with his mother at a young age

Robert as a young author at the age of 26

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 ye grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be,

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Robert Louis Stevenson (c.1850-1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist, best known for his adventure stories like Treasure Island. Stevenson was a sickly man (he died of tuberculosis) who nevertheless led an adventurous life. He spent his last five years on the island of Samoa as a planter and chief of the natives.

At the time of penning his own epitaph, Requiem (1879) Stevenson was ill, distraught and close to death. Recovering, he lived another 15 years before passing away in his beloved Samoa. And it is this same poem that can now be found engraved upon his tombstone.