A Child's Garden of Verses

About

Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) is the finest collection of children's poetry in English: lyrics that see the world through a child's perspective with an imaginative sympathy that never condescends. 'My Shadow,' 'The Swing,' 'The Land of Counterpane,' 'Bed in Summer' — poems that generations of children memorized, that adults return to with recognition. Stevenson wrote them largely from his sickbed, recapturing a childhood constrained by illness. As reading material they work across all ages and reward sensitive performance.