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Home  »  A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods  »  V. The House Beautiful

Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894). A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods. 1913.

V. The House Beautiful

A NAKED house, a naked moor,

A shivering pool before the door,

A garden bare of flowers and fruit

And poplars at the garden foot:

Such is the place that I live in,

Bleak without and bare within.

Yet shall your ragged moor receive

The incomparable pomp of eve,

And the cold glories of the dawn

Behind your shivering trees be drawn;

And when the wind from place to place

Doth the unmoored cloud-galleons chase,

Your garden gloom and gleam again,

With leaping sun, with glancing rain

Here shall the wizard moon ascend

The heavens, in the crimson end

Of day’s declining splendour; here

The army of the stars appear.

The neighbour hollows dry or wet,

Spring shall with tender flowers beset;

And oft the morning muser see

Larks rising from the broomy lea,

And every fairy wheel and thread

Of cobweb dew-bediamonded.

When daisies go, shall winter time

Silver the simple grass with rime;

Autumnal frosts enchant the pool

And make the cart-ruts beautiful;

And when snow-bright the moor expands,

How shall your children clap their hands!

To make this earth, our hermitage,

A cheerful and a changeful page,

God’s bright and intricate device

Of days and seasons doth suffice.