A Child's Dream of the Zoo

A late 19th-century children's poem that transports young readers into a wonder-soaked dream of the zoo. Here, the boundaries between child and creature dissolve entirely. The lions are not to be feared but befriended; the monkeys descend from their perches to play games; the entire menagerie becomes a landscape of possibility rather than threat. Manning writes with the affectionate absurdity that only Victorian-era children's literature could muster, inviting readers to see the zoo not as a place of observation but of communion. The poem pulses with the particular magic of a child's imagination set free, where bedtime becomes an adventure and the sleeping mind becomes a door to something luminous. It endures because it captures something true about childhood: the conviction that the world, even its wildest corners, wants to befriend you.