Requiem

The poem is staged beneath a wide and starry night sky. The poet invites the reader, terrified over the idea of mortality and the grim ritual of interment in the ground, to stand beneath the sky, to open up to nature’s still, loving presence, and to conceive of death as a return to that animated cosmos.

In an era in which science systematically sought to disenchant nature and render it as little more than a bland and indifferent complex of laws and predictable processes, the poem celebrates the ancient, mystical consolation of nature as a living thing that will not accept death as the final word. The poem, after all, is about the ritual of burial, itself a process that for millennia has recreated symbolically the return of the body to the embrace of the earth, a satisfying cycle that makes burial itself a kind of homecoming. The poem argues that the process of interment is neither grim nor gothic. Burial restores a person to the open embrace of nature itself. Biography tempts—Stevenson himself would instruct that he be buried along the slope of a volcano on a remote South Sea island, the very manifestation of the idea of nature as consolation in the event of death.