Favorite Poetry: Robert Louis Stevenson

Foreign Lands

Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad on foreign lands.

I saw the next door garden lie
Adorned with flowers before my eye,
And many pleasant places more
That I had never seen before.

I saw the dimpling river pass
And be the sky's blue looking-glass;
The dusty roads go up and down
With people tramping into town.

If I could find a higher tree
Farther and farther I should see,
To where the grown-up river slips
Into the sea among the ships,

To where the roads on either hand
Lead onward into fairy land,
Where all the children dine at five,
And all the playthings come alive.

-Robert Louis Stevenson
Taken from Let's Pretend: Poems of Flight and Fancy, compiled by Natalie S. Bober

Other works by Stevenson you might enjoy:

 

Farewell, James.

After a bit more than a week of flying peaches, giant insects, and angry cloudmen, we have finished reading Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, our first official school read-aloud.  Syd loved it, and part of the reason we finished so much more quickly than I'd planned is because she begged and whined until I'd read, on average, four or five chapters a day, at least.  If we keep up this pace, we'll be through the list I'd planned for the entire year within a few months.