A Child’s Garden of Verses

By Robert Louis Stevenson

First published in 1885, ‘A Child's Garden of Verses’ is a collection of poetry for children by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, a collection that concerns childhood, illness, play, and solitude. Stevenson dedicated the poems to his nurse Alison Cunningham, who cared for him during his many childhood illnesses.
The collection first appeared under the title Penny Whistles but has been reprinted many times, often in illustrated versions. It contains about 65 poems including the cherished classics ‘Foreign Children’, ‘The Lamplighter’, ‘The Land of Counterpane’, ‘Bed in Summer’, ‘My Shadow’ and ‘The Swing’.
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, travel writer, and a leading representative of English literature. Mr. Stevenson was often ill as a child and spent much of his youth confined to his nursery, where he first began to compose stories even before he could read, and where he was cared for by his nanny, Alison Cunningham, to whom A Child's Garden of Verses is dedicated.
"Time which none can bind,
While flowing fast away, leaves love behind."
—Robert Louis Stevenson (A Child's Garden of Verses)

• Language: English
• Publisher: General Press
• Release date: Aug 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9789354997860

Book preview

To Alison Cunningham

From Her Boy

For all you pitied, all you bore,

In sad and happy days of yore:—

My second Mother, my first Wife,

The angel of my infant life—

From the sick child, now well and old,

Take, nurse, the little book you hold!

And grant it, Heaven, that all who read

May find as dear a nurse at need,

And every child who lists my rhyme,

In the bright, fireside, nursery clime,

May hear it in as kind a voice

As made my childish days rejoice!

R. L. S.

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A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES

Poem 1

Bed in Summer

* * * * * * *

In winter I get up at night

And dress by yellow candle-light.

In summer, quite the other way,

I have to go to bed by day.

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I have to go to bed and see

The birds still hopping on the tree,

Or hear the grown-up people’s feet

Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,

When all the sky is clear and blue,

And I should like so much to play,

To have to go to bed by day?

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Mary

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Hans

Poem 2

A Thought

* * * * * * *

It is very nice to think

The world is full of meat and drink,

With little children saying grace

In every Christian kind of place.

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Biddy

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Fifine

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Bed in Summer

Poem 3

At the Sea-Side

* * * * * * *

When I was down beside the sea

A wooden spade they gave to me

To dig the sandy shore.

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My holes were empty like a cup.

In every hole the sea came up,

Till it could come no more.

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Poem 4

Young Night-Thought

* * * * * * *

All night long and every night,

When my mama puts out the light,

I see the people marching by,

As plain as day, before my eye.

Armies and emperors and kings,

All carrying different kinds of things,

And marching in so grand a way,

You never saw the like by day.

So fine a show was never seen

At the great circus on the green;

For every