A Child's Garden of Verses
Sixty-four short poems about swings, shadows, lamplighters, going to bed and being ill. Stevenson wrote them from the perspective of a child, and the collection has been a fixture of nurseries since 1885.
The poems are simple without being stupid, and the best of them, The Swing, The Lamplighter, My Shadow, are still memorable. Some are sentimental, and a few are dated. Read a handful at a time; the book is designed for that, and it is a good place to begin reading poetry aloud.
Public-domain status
First published in 1885. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894, so this work has been free to republish there since 1965.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 25609 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, 1855
- The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1400
- Troilus and Criseyde — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1385
- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage — Lord Byron, 1812
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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