✦ A Classic Poem ✦
A friendly red and white cow wanders the meadow, eats the meadow flowers, and gives cream for apple tart. A gentle, sunny poem for the very young.
Read aloud by Storyland Classics ✦ 1 min 11 sec ✦ Watch on YouTube
✦ The Poem ✦
by Robert Louis Stevenson, from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). Public domain.
The friendly cow all red and white, I love with all my heart: She gives me cream with all her might, To eat with apple-tart.
She wanders lowing here and there, And yet she cannot stray, All in the pleasant open air, The pleasant light of day;
And blown by all the winds that pass And wet with all the showers, She walks among the meadow grass And eats the meadow flowers.
✦ About the Poem ✦
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is best known for Treasure Island and Kidnapped, but A Child’s Garden of Verses, published in 1885, may be his most loved book. He was often ill as a boy in Edinburgh and spent long days in bed, and these poems remember childhood from the inside, in a child’s own voice.
Nothing much happens in “The Cow,” and that is its charm. In three short verses the child notices the cow’s colors, her lowing, the fence that keeps her from straying, and the wind and rain she lives in. It is a lesson in looking closely at something ordinary until it feels special.
✦ Talk About It ✦