Lyric Poem · For Kids
Foreign Children
1Little Indian, Sioux, or Crow,
2Little frosty Eskimo,
3Little Turk or Japanee,
4Oh! don't you wish that you were me?
5You have seen the scarlet trees
6And the lions over seas;
7You have eaten ostrich eggs,
8And turned the turtle off their legs.
Full-text availability follows the United States display decision recorded below; status can differ elsewhere.
“Foreign Children” by Robert Louis Stevenson — quilloak.com/poems/foreign-children
Quick facts
- Poem
- Foreign Children
- Poet
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Length
- 20 lines
- Form
- Lyric Poem
- Themes
- For Kids, Nature, Winter, Childhood
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
- 20 lines · 4 stanzas of 4–8 lines
- Line length
- Mostly 7-syllable lines.
- Refrains
- “Little frosty Eskimo,”“Little Turk or Japanee,”“Oh! don't you wish that you were me?”Repeated lines act as the poem's hinge or drumbeat.
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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
- PoetryDBForeign Children 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 6f0285d915d7aa6f…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.