Robert Louis Stevenson
You may wonder why I have chosen to include these poems in a section about myself as an adult, however, this section is also meant to be about the things closest to me. When I was a little girl and just learning to read, my father, a man who was determined to raise a child with a love of reading, gave me a wonderfully illustrated version of “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” Although, at the time, I couldn’t understand all the poetry in the book I was immediately attracted to the wonderful illustrations and some of the imagery in the poems. I spent hours on end looking through the book, learning the poems and asking questions about the quaint English traditions mentioned in the book. Now, as an adult, with my father gone this book serves as a legacy to me from him and serves as a reminder of my humble beginning as a child learning to read and beginning to experience the world for herself. I hope you enjoy the poems I’ve selected as much as I did as a child and as much as I do now.
Bed in Summer
This poem will always remind me of the true annoyance I always felt as child that I was expected to sleep when I wanted to play outside in the bright summer light until the stars filled the sky and I truly felt it was time for bed.
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.
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 on 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?
The Land of Counterpane
When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.
And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills.
And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.
I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And see before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant Land of Counterpane.
The Land of Nod
As a child, I was fascinated with this poem due to the images on the page (renderings of satyrs, Pegasus, animals and all sorts of creatures) as well as the concept of the land of Nod. It was always a nice reminder that sleep wasn’t the end- it was simply an escape to a world where I had no boundaries.
From breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the Land of Nod.
All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do-
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.
The strangest things are these for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the Land of Nod.
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.
Fairy Bread
My fascination with faeries and fairy tales started very early…
Come up here, O dusty feet!
Here is fairy bread to eat.
Here in my retiring room
Children, you may dine
On the golden smell of broom
And the shade of pine;
And when you have eaten well,
Fairy stories hear and tell.
My Kingdom
Down by a shining water well
I found a very little dell,
No higher than my head.
The heather and the gorse about
In summer bloom were coming out,
Some yellow and some red.
I called the little pool a sea;
The hills were big to me;
For I am very small.
I made a boat, I made a town,
I searched the caverns up and down,
And named them one and all.
And all about was mine, I said,
The little sparrows overhead,
The little minnows too.
This was the world and I was king;
For me the bees came by to sing,
For me the swallows flew.
I played there were no deeper seas,
Nor any wider plains than these,
Nor other kings than me.
At last I heard my mother call
Out from the house at evenfall,
To call me home to tea.
And I must rise and leave my dell,
And leave my dimpled water well,
And leave my heather blooms.
Alas! And as my home I neared,
How very big my nurse appeared,
How great and cool the rooms!
The Flowers
My favorite poem as a little girl.
All the names I know from nurse:
Gardener’s garters, Shepherd’s purse,
Bachelor’s buttons, Lady’s smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.
Fairy places, fairy things,
Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,
Tiny trees for tiny dames-
These must all be fairy names!
Tiny wood below whose boughs
Shady fairies weave a house;
Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,
Where the braver fairies climb!
Fair are grown-up people’s trees,
But the fairest woods are these;
Where if I were not so tall,
I should live for good and all.
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