As far as I remember it goes something like "....home is the hunter from the hills"

Here you go Betty-Jean



Home Is the Sailor
---A.E. Housman


Home is the sailor, home from sea:
  Her far-borne canvas furled
The ship pours shining on the quay
   The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:
    Fast in the boundless snare
All flesh lies taken at his will
  And every fowl of air.

'Tis evening on the moorland free,
   The starlit wave is still:
Home is the sailor from the sea,
   The hunter from the hill.

Les



Post Edited (03-21-05 11:30)

good Les, I could only find "Home is the hunter from the hills. The sailor from the sea, And thou art home, O friend of my heart. And will come back to me"

Hold hard: before AEH.

Epitaph

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and glad did I die
And I lay me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longs to be.
Home is the sailor, home from sea
And the hunter home from the hill.
-R. L. Stevenson


"This be the verse" in turn inspired Philip Larkin's most...famous, shall we say?...poem.

Housman's poem is simply titled R.L.S.

It was number XXII in Additional Poems, published in 1939.

Housman's poem: R. L. S. is Robert Louis Stevenson- Housman's own adaptation and memorial to him.

Gavin Bell climbed up Mount Veae in Samoa to visit Stevenson's grave on a small plateau near the summit. He found that the two verses were inscribed on a plaque attached to the gravestone.

In his book In Search of Tusitala, he quotes some further lines from Stevenson's Requiem, written in San Francisco fifteen years before his death;

You, who pass this grave, put aside hatred; love kindness; be all services remembered in your heart, and all offences pardoned; and as you go down again among the living, let this be your question: can I make some one happier this day before I lie down to sleep? Thus the dead man speaks to you from the dust: you will hear no more from him.

I can understand why Housman should have admired him so.

The correct wording of the two verses on Stevenson's gravestone is

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 sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

I believe he titled it 'Requiem' (as mentioned by Henry), not 'Epitaph', but don't know whether the title appears on the gravestone.