A Child's Garden of Verses
1885
A Child's Garden of Verses
1885
These are not poems about children. They are poems from within childhood itself - a shimmering interior world where cherry trees become foreign lands and shadows harbor escaped prisoners. Written by Robert Louis Stevenson at thirty-four, looking back with fierce tenderness at the consciousness he once inhabited, these sixty-four verses possess the rare gift of remembering childhood as it actually felt: the vast importance of a garden, the terror and beauty of night, the unbearable slowness of waiting for one's father. Tasha Tudor's watercolors here are themselves a kind of poetry - soft English meadows and guttering candles that make the past feel like a place you could step into. The book works as a door. Step through, and you are seven again, hiding in the gooseberry bushes, watching the lamplighter walk his slow circuit down the street.
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“The world is so full of a number of things, I ’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“The rain is falling all around,It falls on field and tree,It rains on the umbrellas here,And on the ships at sea.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“In winter I get up at night,and dress by yellow candlelight,In summer, quite the other day,I have to go to bed by day””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“To My MotherYou too, my mother, read my rhymesFor love of unforgotten times,And you may chance to hear once moreThe little feet along the floor.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Time which none can bind,While flowing fast away, leaves love behind.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“All by myself I have to go, With none to tell me what to do”
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“How do you like to go up in a swing,Up in the air so blue?Oh, I do think it is the pleasantest thingEver a child can do!””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Time to Rise A birdie with a yellow bill Hopped upon my window sill, Cocked his shining eye and said: "Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-head!””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Try as I like to find the way, I never can get back by day, Nor can remember plain and clear The curious music that I hear.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
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Stevenson, Robert Louis. A Child's Garden of Verses. Lex, lex-books.com/book/a-child-s-garden-of-verses-4757ddd0-14a9-4bfc-bed2-50662ba9b281.Stevenson, R. L. (1885). A Child's Garden of Verses. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-child-s-garden-of-verses-4757ddd0-14a9-4bfc-bed2-50662ba9b281Stevenson, Robert Louis. A Child's Garden of Verses. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-child-s-garden-of-verses-4757ddd0-14a9-4bfc-bed2-50662ba9b281.
