Requiem

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1915

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Stevenson was by conviction and by temperament a Neo-Romantic, or more precisely a Romantic 2.0. Although Stevenson’s immense success and his international reputation rested more on his novels than on his poetry, Stevenson’s verse, most notably collected in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), a best-selling volume marketed as a quaint, sentimental gathering of children’s poetry, reflected his place within a late-19th century literary movement that came to be known as Neo-Romanticism. Neo-Romanticism was something of an umbrella term applied to fin de millennium writers as well as to painters and composers to define the last of the old school Romantics, even as the volatile era of Modernism with its focus on radical experimentation with artistic forms was beginning.

By contrast to radical Modernism, the Neo-Romantics worked familiar forms into reassuring arguments, works that sought to inspire, delight, and engage. Indeed, the commercial success of the Neo-Romantics in writing, most notably Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), A. E. Housman (1859-1936), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), and Nobelist Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), in many ways fueled the Modernists’ disdain for conventionality and for market success. With the death in 1850 of the towering figure of William Wordsworth, the daring and uncompromising architect of the Romantic spirit, at the age of 80, the new generation of poets convinced of the continuing viability of the Romantic revolution, among them Stevenson, strived to maintain that movement’s credo of embracing the tonic wonder of nature, relying on the excavation into the most extreme expressions of the emotional life of the poet, and supremely its faith in the visionary role of poets to explore the mysteries and wonders of their world and in turn to ignite their readers with the inspirational gospel of empowerment and spiritual animation. Because they were second-generation revolutionaries, however, the revolution now seemed tame, even conventional, and most telling of all thoroughly establishment.

Historical Context

For all its apparent simplicity and greeting card wisdom, “Requiem,” in invoking the burial rituals of Judeo-Christianity and the profound consolation of nature, confronts and ultimately refutes the late-19th-century apprehensions over the wide embrace of science. By the latter decades of the 19th century, historians and archeologists had exposed much of the Christian faith in the person of Jesus and the drama of salvation as at best a well-intentional cautionary story and at worst a delusion. With religion suddenly bankrupt of its influence and reduced to a polite social ritual, and the soul itself to a bland metaphor for the conscience, Stevenson’s generation turned to the worldview of science. Determined to understand the material universe and decode its mysteries into tidy laws, science in turn reduced humanity, really existence itself, to the play-out of predictable patterns of behavior, love to a calculated expression of a species that will not accept its own extinction, and death itself to an entirely unremarkable failure of any one of a number of the body’s complex systems. Science provided explanation but denied meaning or purpose to it all. Comfort theoretically came from understanding not from mystery. Natural phenomena—the sun, the stars, rainbows, the rain, the planets, the seas—were downscaled into tightly organized and entirely joyless manifestations of laws. Science could explain just about everything except why everything was there.

Stevenson is no fool. He understands, as did all the intellectuals of his generation, that science was leaving little choice but to see a world that was infinite, really unmappable, and colossally indifferent to the efforts of puny humanity to matter. “Requiem,” however, uses that sense of the inevitability of death and its evident pointlessness as a rallying cry. Yes, death is absolute, yes, the grave is waiting, but without the distractions of fretting over the disposition of the soul in some longshot afterlife, a person is now free to live every moment and then death will be a welcome home. Stevenson assumes the dark vision of science but uses it as rationale for rejecting hopelessness and pessimism.