Requiem

“Requiem” is a tight construct, two carefully measured quatrains, that is two stanzas of four lines with the rhyme scheme AAAB and CCCB respectively. What that means is that the fourth and eighth lines of the poem, the closing lines of each stanza, rhyme.

That quatrain form gifts the poem with the feel of a children’s poem, almost like a nursery rhyme. That form helps Stevenson with his thematic argument that death is not something to fear. The easy beat and the compelling rhyme scheme eases, even mocks the inclination to see a poem about death and burial as forbidding, even disturbing. Death and burials are traditionally the stuff of blank verse, stately and august, not quatrains. The easy beat of quatrains is for kids and for telling stories. As demonstrated by the number of musical settings this poem has inspired, the form creates accessibility and invites rather than intimidates an audience.

The curious pattern of the end rhyme scheme, that is the look back, a rhyming echo, from the close of the second quatrain back to the closing line of the first quatrain helps underscore not only the poet’s understanding of death but his resistance to wanting to die.