22 pages 44 minutes read

Requiem

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1915

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Literary Devices

Form

“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. The poem, after all, is not about how to die but rather how to live so that when death comes it can only offer repose. The poet is thinking about death but pulling himself back to avoid the surrender to despair and hopelessness. The point of the poem is that the poet is reminding himself that he still has much living to do. The rhyme pattern thus gives the poem that momentum forward, suggesting the lure of death, and the critical pullback feel much as the close of poem pulls back to the first quatrain. This formal pattern suggests hesitation, ambivalence, and the poet’s determination to resist the intoxicating lure of the grave.

Meter

The poem is rhythmic, a reflection of the Neo-Romantic belief that regular rhythm and balanced rhyme schemes aid in both listening to a poem and in turn remembering it at moments when its wisdom might comfort, even inspire.

The metric read of the poem, however, is at once regular and irregular, reflecting the poet’s argument that death is to be anticipated but not embraced. Three of the four lines of each quatrain move at a steady and reassuring beat, tetrameter, that is four beats per line. The beat alternates between trochaic, a deliberate stressed-unstressed pace, and iambic, unaccented followed by accented. In either case, the rhythms animate each line. The careful interplay between the two tetrameter rhythms gives those lines an accessible percussive feel that, given the poet’s delight in long and sonorous open vowels and luscious rolling consonants (particularly the plethora of r’s and l’s) and the aspirated h’s in the second stanza, lends itself to dramatic recitation, appropriate to a church service or a memorial requiem.

The closing line of each stanza, however, is trimeter, that is three beats per line, with an unstressed-unstressed-stressed pattern. The break in meter disturbs. Reading the poem aloud must adjust to the interruption of the tetrameter meter. Caught unaware, a reader easily stumbles because the rhythm is so clearly, so cleanly violated. The closing line of each stanza deliberately drags a bit, slows down the percussive feel of the other lines. That metric patterning suggests the poem’s thematic argument: Death is real, certainly, but there is no hurry to embrace it. The poem slows its own momentum and compels the metric argument to reflect the determination to maintain the steady, reassuring animation of living.

Voice

Because nearly 15 years after its composition, “Requiem” was inscribed, at the poet’s direction, on his own tomb, there is a compelling argument that the voice in the poem is best defined as Stevenson himself. Certainly, there is a credible case. After all, the voice in the poem is determined to commit to the busy-ness of living rather than surrender to the siren call of death. From his childhood, when he was bedridden for months at a time with weak lungs, Stevenson struggled with poor health. Despite his peripatetic lifestyle once he departed Edinburgh after obtaining a law degree he never really used, his multiple ocean crossings (despite doctors’ warnings), his romantic commitment to exploring widely both Europe and America, Stevenson never had a vigorous constitution but never surrendered to common sense limitations. In that way, his life is clearly reflected in the bravado of the voice that speaks “Requiem.” Live, not despite death but because of death.

Yet Stevenson is careful not to limit the voice to his own experience. The symbols he uses to define a life amply, gladly lived, the hunter and the sailor, can be universally applied. The poem is not some solipsistic Ode to My Own Frail Health. Indeed, the voice stays generic. The brief lyric reads as like it should be the closing quatrains of some magnificent adventure epic that moves in its hushed but defiant closing to affirm death is welcome after a life lived. That voice, at once personal and expansive, specific and generic, gives the poem a universal voice, a reader aspires for this to be read at their own funeral or inscribed on their own tomb.

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