Next perhaps to some hymn writers and the apostle John, Robert Louis Stevenson was probably the first poetic voice to speak to my heart. I shared his poems early with my daughter, and have continued to share them as she grows. She loves his work too.
There are so many repeated images and themes in his poetry that I love: dreams; rain; birds; ships at sea. I love that he is such a liminal poet. He seems to walk boundaries -- day/night, dark/light, sun/shadow, childhood/adulthood, waking/sleeping -- with the gracefulness of a tightrope walker.
We read a brief biography of him this morning, from the Robert Louis Stevenson volume in the "Poetry for Young People" series. A few of the facts we gleaned:
He came from a long line of lighthouse builders; he built poems.
He was ill during much of his childhood and spent a lot of time in bed; his weak lungs often meant he'd spend long nights coughing and longing for the dawn. Small wonder he explored the things he did.
His lungs never did get better. He ended up living in Samoa in his later years, searching for warm climates where he could breathe more easily. He died there of tuberculosis at the incredibly young age of 44. On his gravestone are etched these words, which he himself penned:
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 the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
The Scottish Stevenson as painted by Sargent
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