A Child's Garden of Verses

The Title Page of a 1916 Edition

A Child's Garden of Verses is a collection of poetry for children about darkness and solitude by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. The collection first appeared in 1885 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."

The classical scholar Terrot Reaveley Glover published a translation of the poems into Latin in 1922 under the title Carmina non prius audita de ludis et hortis virginibus puerisque.

The Poems

Part I - A Child's Garden of Verses

• To Alison Cunningham
• Bed in Summer
• A Thought
• At the Sea-side
• Young Night Thought
• Whole Duty of Children
• Rain
• Pirate Story
• Foreign Lands
• Windy Nights
• Travel
• Singing
• Looking Forward
• A Good Play
• Where Go the Boats?
• Auntie’s Skirts
• The Land of Counterpane
• The Land of Nod
• My Shadow
• System
• A Good Boy
• Escape at Bedtime
• Marching Song
• The Cow
• Happy Thought
• The Wind
• Keepsake Mill
• Good and Bad Children
• Foreign Children
• The Sun's Travels
• The Lamplighter
• My Bed is a Boat
• The Moon
• The Swing
• Time to Rise
• Looking-glass River
• Fairy Bread
• From a Railway Carriage
• Winter-time
• The Hayloft
• Farewell to the Farm
• Northwest Passage: Good Night, Shadow March, In Port

The Child Alone

• The Unseen Playmate
• My Ship and I
• My Kingdom
• Picture-books in Winter
• My Treasures
• Block City
• The Land of Story-books
• Armies in the Fire
• The Little Land

Garden Days

• Night and Day
• Nest Eggs
• The Flowers
• Summer Sun
• The Dumb Soldier
• Autumn Fires
• The Gardener
• Historical Associations

Envoys

• To Willie and Henrietta
• To My Mother
• To Auntie
• To Minnie
• To My Name-child
• To Any Reader

Ebook version

Several ebook formats of this book are available for free at (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25617).

Happy Thought, as used in A Little Book for A Little Cook, 1905

Adaptations

• The Italian composer Carlo Deri composed (2005) a song for voice and piano, The Unseen Playmate, on Stevenson's poem. This song is also included in Deri's one-act opera Markheim (2008).^[1]

References

External links

• "A Child's Garden of Verses" at Bartleby.com
• "A Child's Garden of Verses" from the Collections of the Library of Congress
• The CD "Kirschbaumtage / Cherry Tree Days" on the artists homepage
• A Child's Garden of Verses public domain audiobook at LibriVox