✦ A Classic Poem ✦

The Land of Counterpane

A poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, from A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1885

A sick child stays in bed and turns the blankets into hills, valleys, and seas for toy soldiers and ships. A poem about how imagination makes a long day pass.

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✦ The Poem ✦

The Land of Counterpane

by Robert Louis Stevenson, from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). Public domain.

When I was sick and lay a-bed, I had two pillows at my head, And all my toys beside me lay, To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so I watched my leaden soldiers go, With different uniforms and drills, Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets All up and down among the sheets; Or brought my trees and houses out, And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still That sits upon the pillow-hill, And sees before him, dale and plain, The pleasant land of counterpane.

✦ About the Poem ✦

A Whole World on a Bedspread

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.

A counterpane is an old word for a bedspread. Stevenson was often sick as a child, and this poem comes straight from those days in bed: the blanket folds become hills and valleys, the sheets become a sea, and the child becomes a giant looking down on a little kingdom.

✦ Talk About It ✦

Questions to Share

What is a counterpane?
What did the child do with the toy soldiers and ships?
If you had to stay in bed all day, what world would you build on your blanket?

✦ Keep Reading ✦

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