As a teenager I was sent to boarding school in Devon some aspects of which I actually enjoyed. Many more I did not. As an older boy I recall, either through a reading club or poetry evening, a boy I knew read Robert Louis Stevenson and was amazed by the poem on his gravestone. I could see the ‘wow’ factor on his face.
Every year we held an inter-house drama competition (one of the things I enjoyed) and this boy who was a huge tower of a man, loved rubgy and was not known for his intellectual prowess (in fact he wanted to join the Hong Kong police force known to have a limited life expectancy) wrote his own play and performed the main role.
In the middle of this he gave a monologue and at the end of the monologue he quoted the poem:
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 long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
It was one of those moments one never forgets. A tall, young man standing on a stage in front of the school revealing sensitivity he could not contain, opened up by the words of a dead Victorian.
I have often thought of him in his policing duties and hope he kept the deep feelings he obviously possessed.