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 longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

These lines are from Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “Requiem,” written in 1887 during a period of ill health and frequent travel. Stevenson, long afflicted with tuberculosis and seeking climates that might ease his condition, lived much of his later life away from Britain. The poem functions as a self-composed epitaph: a calm, deliberate set of instructions for his burial and the words to be carved on his grave. After Stevenson’s death in Samoa in 1894, the poem (or a close version of it) was inscribed on his tomb on Mount Vaea, giving the piece a literal afterlife as the memorial he had imagined.

“Requiem” presents death not as defeat but as chosen rest after a life fully embraced. The “wide and starry sky” frames burial within a vast, impersonal nature, suggesting serenity rather than terror. Stevenson’s repeated “glad” emphasizes consent and gratitude: he has lived and dies without resentment. The closing couplets turn death into homecoming—“Home is the sailor… / And the hunter…”—metaphors for the end of striving, travel, and pursuit. The poem’s plain diction and hymn-like cadence give it the authority of a final testament, making its acceptance of mortality feel both personal and universal.

Commonly quoted without the initial instruction line: “This be the verse you grave for me: / Here he lies where he longed to be; / Home is the sailor, home from sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.”