This is a beautifully simple poem of eight lines in two stanzas that is beautifully constructed. The first three lines in each stanza rhyme (and simple rhymes they are: sky, lie, die; and me, be, sea; none more than three letters) and the last lines of each stanza rhyme (will, hill). (There’s probably a name for this structure, but I don’t know what it is. Perhaps you do. AI probably does, but I can’t be bothered to look it up.) The meter is simple. All the words are simple—would be known to a six-year-old, and all are five letters or fewer. The only complicated part of the poem is grave used a verb.

Although a six-year-old could read and enjoy the poem, its theme is the ordinariness of death and how death is to be welcomed: “Glad did I live and gladly die,” and “Here he lies where he longed to be.” Death is coming home, back to the wide and starry sky.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) , one of the world’s most popular novelists, died aged 44 on the island of Samoa, which he saw being destroyed.

Requiem by Robert Louis Stevenson

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 longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill.