Classic fiction

A Child's Garden of Verses

by Robert Louis Stevenson

67 pages · First published 1885

A Child’s Garden of Verses gathers Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems about the imaginative world of childhood. Beds become boats, shadows acquire personalities, gardens become foreign countries, and ordinary rooms expand through play. Many poems also preserve the rhythms and domestic details of a nineteenth-century childhood shaped by illness, nurseries, and outdoor observation. The collection remains notable for taking a child’s imaginative perspective seriously, though some poems reflect assumptions and language of Stevenson’s Victorian era.