A Child's Garden of Verses
A Child's Garden of Verses
Stevenson wrote these poems from inside childhood, not looking back at it, and that makes all the difference. Here is a world where cherry trees become foreign lands, where blankets transform into ships, where the lamplighter's arrival is an event as momentous as any comet. The sixty-four poems in this collection capture the specific magic of small hours: the joy of staying up past bedtime, the thrill of building block cities, the strange country of the Land of Nod where sleep takes you. Stevenson never condescends to his young readers or reaches for false sweetness. Instead he offers something rarer: honest remembrance of how vast a child's inner life actually was. The world of a five-year-old, rendered here in perfect, singing lines, contains oceans and continents and whole civilizations built from cushions and imagination. This is the book adults return to when they want to remember what it felt like to be small, and the book children claim as their own because it speaks their actual language, not a watered-down version of it. A century and a half later, these verses still work their gentle alchemy.
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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
