Lyric Poem · For Kids
Envoy For "A Child's Garden Of Verses"
1WHETHER upon the garden seat
2You lounge with your uplifted feet
3Under the May's whole Heaven of blue;
4Or whether on the sofa you,
5No grown up person being by,
6Do some soft corner occupy;
7Take you this volume in your hands
8And enter into other lands,
9For lo! (as children feign) suppose
10You, hunting in the garden rows,
11Or in the lumbered attic, or
12The cellar - a nail-studded door
13And dark, descending stairway found
14That led to kingdoms underground:
15There standing, you should hear with ease
16Strange birds a-singing, or the trees
17Swing in big robber woods, or bells
18On many fairy citadels:
19There passing through (a step or so -
20Neither mamma nor nurse need know!)
21From your nice nurseries you would pass,
22Like Alice through the Looking-Glass
23Or Gerda following Little Ray,
24To wondrous countries far away.
25Well, and just so this volume can
26Transport each little maid or man
27Presto from where they live away
28Where other children used to play.
29As from the house your mother sees
30You playing round the garden trees,
31So you may see if you but look
32Through the windows of this book
33Another child far, far away
34And in another garden play.
35But do not think you can at all,
36By knocking on the window, call
37That child to hear you. He intent
38Is still on his play-business bent.
39He does not hear, he will not look,
40Nor yet be lured out of this book.
41For long ago, the truth to say,
42He has grown up and gone away;
43And it is but a child of air
44That lingers in the garden there.
Full-text availability follows the United States display decision recorded below; status can differ elsewhere.
“Envoy For "A Child's Garden Of Verses"” by Robert Louis Stevenson — quilloak.com/poems/envoy-for-a-childs-garden-of-verses
Quick facts
- Poem
- Envoy For "A Child's Garden Of Verses"
- Poet
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Length
- 44 lines
- Form
- Lyric Poem
- Themes
- For Kids, Nature, Childhood, Peace
Craft notes
How this poem works
Measured from the text on this page, not copied from a summary. Counts are approximate: syllables and rhymes come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which models General American English, so dialect, older pronunciation, and performance can all change what you hear.
- Shape
- 44 lines · 2 stanzas of 18–26 lines
- Line length
- Mostly 8-syllable lines (tetrameter length).
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Text, source & rights
A traceable edition
Full-text display is based on the committed source record and a United States term-expiry review.
- Author record
- Robert Louis Stevenson1850–1894
- Source record
- PoetryDBEnvoy For "A Child's Garden Of Verses" by robert-louis-stevenson, PoetryDB transcription
- Display decision
- Full text · United States · reviewed 2026-07-18
- Publication record
- Not recorded in the imported source
- Text fingerprint
- SHA-256 10aec7dbddbebfed…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.