The Cow

Robert Louis Stevenson transforms the humble cow into a small masterpiece of childhood wonder in this gem from A Child's Garden of Verses. Written from a young person's unselfconscious perspective, the poem celebrates the "friendly cow all red and white" with the kind of earnest affection only a child can muster, finding pure joy in cream with apple tart and the animal's wandering, lowing freedom. Yet beneath its cheerful surface lies a gentle melancholy the finest children's poetry achieves: the awareness that the cow cannot find good grass, that freedom and satisfaction don't always arrive together. Stevenson's genius here is making the ordinary extraordinary, turning a farm animal into a window through which a child sees the world with fresh, unjaded eyes. This is verse that remembers what it felt like to be small and delighted by simplest things, to love without complication, to find magic in a cow standing in a field.