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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In the middle of this he gave a monologue and at the end of the monologue he quoted the poem:<\/p>\n
UNDER the wide and starry sky
\nDig the grave and let me lie:
\nGlad did I live and gladly die,
\nAnd I laid me down with a will.<\/p>\n
This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
\nHere he lies where he long’d to be;
\nHome is the sailor, home from the sea,
\nAnd the hunter home from the hill.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I have often thought of him in his policing duties and hope he kept the deep feelings he obviously possessed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[610,634],"class_list":["post-693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily","tag-robert-louis-stevenson","tag-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.footstepsbooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.footstepsbooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.footstepsbooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.footstepsbooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.footstepsbooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.footstepsbooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.footstepsbooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.footstepsbooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.footstepsbooks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}