When I used a Robert Louis Stevenson poem last July I wasn’t expecting to follow it up with another. When introducing his “Bed in Summer”  then I mentioned that writing poetry for children, as Stevenson was doing in his A Childs Garden of Verses,  seemed to reduce some of the fustian of a lot of Victorian verse.

So, when I happened upon this other example from that collection I was even more struck by the sensibility of this one. Though I had no reason to believe Stevenson was intending visionary poetry, today’s piece could almost fit inside of Blake’s Songs of Innocence  — though it was written a half-a-century after Blake’s death.

Here’s one illustrated edition of the book and the original text with Stevenson’s title “To Any Reader”

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What was the author’s intent? I first read it as Stevenson making a pitch that even if the poems in his book might someday seem quaint and old-fashioned, they could still relate to like-experiences of some future another child. Was this canny foresight on Stevenson’s part? Stevenson was only 35 when he published this book, so his own childhood memories should not have been all that outdated as he wrote the material. On the other hand, his childhood nurse (to whom the book is dedicated) raised him on John Bunyan, stories from the Bible, and tales of 17^th century Scottish Covenanters. That may have made him aware from a young age that tales from past times could be transmitted to young minds.

I do recall encountering A Child’s Garden of Verses  as a young child in the mid-20^th century, though I can’t say for sure where. Did someone read it to me in my pre-literate days? Was it a book from my parents’ library, perhaps a keepsake from their childhoods? Did I run into it while exhausting my tiny Iowa town’s small library children’s section?

I would not have minded if it was old-fashioned, for I was from a young age fascinated with the past. It could have seemed juvenile unless I came upon it very early in my reading years, but most editions were illustrated, and illustrations excited the ekphrastic in this young reader. Yet my recall on this is not that specific, I just remember that I had seen it. I have more recall of reading Stevenson’s Treasure Island  and enjoying that.

Oddly, when I finally looked this week, this is not the lead-off, introductory poem in the book. Instead, it’s the final poem — not the place to make the case to continue reading “To Any Reader”  who just happened onto the book. Instead, in this place, it’s a ghostly envoi, a reminder to the child (or to the adult reading to them) that they, their childhoods, will obsolete themselves.

As I did with Claude McKay a couple of pieces ago, I decided to adapt Stevenson’s words slightly for singing. Some changes were to make it less awkward to separate things into a series of sung verses. A couple of changes just fit better to my non-agile tongue. Most significantly, I devised a repeating coda to drive home a final summary to the listener. One subtle thing I did was a covert attempt to speak to my own child’s specific journey to young adulthood.

Here’s my version. Since I want to emphasize that other child of air, I also retitled the poem.

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An uncomplicated folk-song style setting seemed appropriate. The chords today are simple for the guitarist, though the alt-tuning I used changes the sound of this simple chord progression slightly. You can hear my performance with the graphical audio player below. If you can’t see any player, I also provide this highlighted link which will open a new tab window with its own audio player.