Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
These are short poems about being a child. A boy plays in bed with his toy soldiers and pretends the blankets are hills and seas. He watches the lamplighter light the street lamps, swings high into the air, and wonders about his shadow, which copies everything he does. Some poems are funny, some are dreamy, and almost all of them are fun to say out loud.
Stevenson arranges the poems like a small life. The collection opens with verses addressed to children and to the child he was, moves through the great subjects of the nursery, beds, gardens, soldiers, ships, shadows, and swings, and closes with poems for the grown people who will read them aloud, looking back at childhood from the far side.
The theme is the seriousness of play. Stevenson never laughs at children; he remembers from inside how a counterpane becomes a landscape and how a shadow can be a companion and a mystery. Sickness shadows the book, since its poet was so often ill in bed, and the poems turn that confinement into freedom by force of imagination.
Few books of verse have been loved so steadily for so long. The poems taught generations of children that poetry could sound like their own thoughts, and writers from A. A. Milne onward learned the trick of the nursery lyric from Stevenson. Recited, memorized, and illustrated again and again, the Garden never goes out of season.
Robert Louis Stevenson published A Child's Garden of Verses in 1885, remembering his own childhood spent largely in bed with illness. Its short, singing poems turn a sickroom into the Land of Counterpane, where toy soldiers march across the bedclothes, follow the lamplighter down the dusk street, and treat play with total seriousness. This is the treasured 1919 illustrated edition, with color pictures by Maria L. Kirk.
A Child's Garden of Verses, published by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1885, is the classic book of childhood in English, and it began in a sickroom. Stevenson, whose lungs kept him in bed for long stretches of his own boyhood, wrote these poems looking back at the kingdom of the nursery: the bed that becomes the Land of Counterpane, ruled by a giant who is also a feverish small boy; the lamplighter whose evening round makes the street magical; the swing, the shadow, the toy soldiers, and the countries seen from a train window. The poems are brief and musical, built to be read aloud and learned by heart, and they are never cute at the child's expense: Stevenson treats play as work of the highest importance and loneliness as a real weather of childhood. This shelf carries the beloved illustrated edition of 1919, in which Maria L. Kirk's color pictures join the verses. Readers, whether they come as parents, grandparents, or grown children remembering, should expect recognition on nearly every page. No book has filed away more of what it felt like to be small.
Edition: Project Gutenberg's improved edition, set from the illustrated edition of 1919 (illustrations by Maria L. Kirk) of the 1885 original. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 28722.
The first chapter
A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES
Title: A Child's Garden of Verses
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Illustrator: Maria Louise Kirk
Release date: May 8, 2009 [eBook #28722]
Most recently updated: August 8, 2019
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28722
Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Emmy and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Click on any of the filenumbers below to quickly view each ebook.
19722(Published in 1916; Black and White illustrations by M. Sheldon)
25608 (Published in 1905; Single Tone illustratons by B. C. Pease)
25609 (Published in 1905; Illustrations in Color by J. W. Smith)
25610 (Published in 1895; Black and White illustrations by C.Robins)
25611 (Publication date unknown; Black and White illustrations)
25617 (Published in 1900; Illustrations in Color by Mars and Squire)
28722 (Published in 1919; Illustrations in Color by Maria L. Kirk)
A CHILD'S GARDEN
OF VERSES
FIFTH IMPRESSION
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1885; this illustrated edition 1919. Author died 1894. Public domain. Share this book: WhatsApp
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