Requiem

“Requiem” is something of a war poem in that it is a verse bravely launched against two opposing forces that in the closing decades of the 19th century fiercely contested for the heart and soul of the British people, indeed of Western civilization itself: religion and science. “Requiem” challenges both, mocks both, endorses neither, and ultimately offers a vital alternative, a way out of the hokey dead-end, no-win High Noon dramatics of these two diametrically opposing worldviews.

Ironically, everything about “Requiem” would anger the Judeo-Christian community that provides the poem’s title and that had, for millennia, executed the Requiem service as a way to affirm a grand, cosmic purpose to existence. The Requiem service was designed as a sober celebration of passage, the body at last relinquishing its tight hold on the soul that was free now to seek its greatest reward, its greatest translation. Live fully and purposefully, the argument went, as a way to enjoy the consolation and reward of the afterlife. Every effort, every move, every decision in a person’s life, no matter how small, had consequence, cosmic consequences, because of the God who demands in the end transparency and insists on accountability accountability that has caused some to view the Judeo-Christian God as an omnipotent Accountant-God, the all-seeing Divine Bookkeeper. The poem cannot endorse such a vision as it induces paranoia and anxiety and demands groveling—at least for Stevenson. Indeed, Stevenson, in his twenties, underwent an emotional falling-out with his conservative parents because of his own growing conviction over the logic of atheism.

Science does not fare much better. The thematic thrust of “Requiem” is a targeted response leveled as well against a generation of British scientists and secular philosophers who collectively worked against the elaborate assumptions of millennia of Judeo-Christian thought designed to provide purpose and meaning in existence through belief in an afterlife and the either-or absolutes of salvation or damnation. Existence, for science, is hardly a cosmic drama, more a biological construct, an endlessly fascinating complex of tightly coordinated bodily functions that, given time, inevitably, invariably, ingloriously fail. To live otherwise is to live within a coaxing fantasy. The problem for Stevenson here is that abandoning the pleasant poetry of Judeo-Christianity left only the dreary reality of finitude. The abandonment of religion left only a few increasingly unsettling alternatives: pointless hedonism in a consequence-free environment, bleak nihilism, happy ignorance, or bottomless despair. What good is life if the afterlife is a hoax and death is all there is in the end?

As it turns out, a great deal. The poem suggests the rich opportunity, with religion rendered ironic and science put in perspective, to live “glad” (Line 3). “Requiem” uses the poet’s emotional equipoise and his calm embrace of the simplest dimension of mortality as both real and inevitable as a powerful corrective to the fluffy extravagances of religion and the cool objectivity of science. The poem, given Stevenson’s choice to keep the narrator’s life-narrative general (even generic), opens up the wisdom of living as the best hedge against fear of death to any reader regardless of economic class, ethnicity, gender, or age. The third alternative then rejects both obeisance to a capricious and distant (and improbable) deity and acceptance of life as a closed cycle of lust and dust. The challenge delivered by the poem is to embrace life as an adventure, part practical endeavor (the hunter scouring the hills for sustenance), part carefree rush (the sailor navigating through crazy waters). Live, the poem argues, as if death is exactly what it is: a pressing reality. Live with the certainty that home will be a grave. Live so that when the time comes to join the dead, join it unbeaten, join it heroic, and “gladly” (Line 3).

The problem stems from the vagueness of the poem’s thematic argument. How exactly does a person live glad? Herein lies the charge often leveled against Stevenson’s poetry, that it is sentimental rather than analytical, emotional rather than aggressively intellectual, safe rather than challenging. The poem panders to its audience, seeks to ease the troubled anxieties of a wide market of minimally-educated readers who in turn understand the poem’s uncomplicated theme and delight in earnestly quoting the poem at appropriate occasions (or inscribing it on their own grave markers), too content to let the exact implications of Stevenson’s theme go ignored. The poem raises anything but rhetorical questions: what exactly is a gladly lived life and how does that life reveal its gladness? Why does living a full and happy life make giving it all up easier? What about those left behind, or is the argument of the poem inherently selfish, denying the pleasures of family, love, and friendship with its implacable use of first-person singular pronouns? These are all questions one might expect from a poem about dying, but they are all outside Stevenson’ scope.

When Stevenson says, “Dig a grave and let me die” (Line 2), he is not taunting a pointless and absurd universe. Nor is he surrendering to its absurdity through despair and indifference. Instead, Stevenson’s words suggest that the poet is never ready to die, that death will always be premature, but that Stevenson will accept death when it does come. I lay me down, he admits, “with a will” (Line 4). The flip and easy tone indicates that the narrator, at once humble and heroic, has lived fully and gladly and is ready now for what he has known all along in his heart and in his head will provide the end of his story, death upcycled now into sweet and satisfying repose. The poem does not make a reader want to die, a charge once leveled against it, but rather to live every joyous, sorrowful moment.