Requiem

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1915

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Starry Sky

The poem is set against a striking backdrop of an open, star-filled night sky. The “wide and starry sky” (Line 1) symbolizes the poem’s sense of affirmation and its resistance to the sorrow typical of the funeral rites. It is, after all, a night sky, all too appropriate for a burial poem given night with its gothic connotations of creepy dread. Dread is not what the poem is about. Wonder is what the poet affirms.

Nature is big, certainly, but offers within that generous magnitude a compelling sense of humanity’s place within it. Importantly, the poet does not demand the stars form into some hokey constellation. He does not insist on scribbling comforting and entirely artificial images to domesticate the night sky. After all, without the reassuring pictures of swans or bears or soup ladles the night sky would be a terrifying expanse of sheer open, a reminder of how small and vulnerable a person set against the vastness and indifference of the material universe is. Rather than pretend the night sky is like the connect-the-dots page in some kid’s coloring book, the poet here positions his grave beneath the open space of the stars themselves, this night sky gloriously undomesticated, wonderfully what it is, a reminder of the enclosing and enveloping strength of a material world whose vastness cannot, will not bow to humanity’s futile insistence on trying to know it into fact.

The Hunter

The poem uses the iconic figure of the hunter roaming the hills to symbolize the well-lived life of practical duties, the seemingly endless busy-ness of earning a living, raising a family, and tending to the day-to-day anything-but extraordinary routine. The hunter symbolizes that practical life. Against a culture just becoming aware of the implications of the rapid growth of industry and the concurrent loss of the agrarian world, Stevenson uses the figure of the hunter to suggest the best spent life draws a person, despite the rise in factories and shops, toward a close relationship with nature. This is not a recreational hunter. Hunters, after all, do not travel far and wide. Their lives are not given to adventure, but rather to the careful work of earning what it takes to survive. Hunters here do not kill for the bloodlust of a sport nor for the adrenaline rush of the kill. Stevenson’s hunter, roaming the hills and ready now to head for the tantalizing rewards of home, symbolizes the rewards of a life spent negotiating with nature, drawing from its resources the commodities necessary to maintain life, the humble benefits of earning a livelihood and finding sustenance.

The poem does not celebrate greed nor chastise the wealthy. Rather, the poem uses the hunter to suggest the necessity of finding what will suffice, what will sustain. Stevenson does not mock the endeavor, does not indict his middle-class readership for its crass materialism, for devoting their lives to the grim and unrewarding work of work. For Stevenson’s middle-class Victorian readership, the hunter symbolizes the values they understood: a modest and admirable work ethic, the quiet virtues of respect, and the rewards of commitment, diligence, and purposeful labor. The hunter then reminds Stevenson’s readers of the virtue and value of their modest lives. Live that sort of modestly rewarding life, the poet counsels, and when death happens, as it must, it can be embraced as a well-earned rest.

The Sailor

If the figure of the hunter roaming the hills symbolizes the rewards of the commitment to the practical, ledger-life of diligence, dedication, responsibilities, and work, the sailor symbolizes the excitement of life lived outside the boundaries, the thrills of the peripatetic life given over to travel, experiencing the marvels and dangers of the open and inviting world that demands liberation from the reassuring roots and stability of home. A sailor moves about one port to the next, always navigating the uncertainties of the open sea and never entirely sure what tomorrow will bring.

A roaming hunter and a roaming sailor are, after all, two entirely different mindsets. The sailor reflects the grand life of spontaneity, the eager embrace of uncertainty and conformity and convention despite the obvious: the sea; that is, the grand openness of life without the grounding of a home and the roots of work and family, can be as exhilarating as it is dangerous. In exchange for accepting the risks (and Stevenson himself nearly died during his own adventures in the open ocean), the sailor engages a horizon that is constantly inconstant, forever moving, forever alluring. The poet is not about the job of favoring one lifestyle over the other—given that Line 7 brings them together, the line suggests that the poet might be more arguing that elements of both, the practical and the adventurous, ultimately define the most satisfying life. Rather the poet acknowledges that whether life is spent dutifully attending the practical responsibilities of work and family or spent discovering the widest reach of the wide world, both the hunter and the sailor, given their lives spent living rather than thinking about living or fearing living, both see the grave as a welcome and inviting home at last.