A Child's Garden of Verses

First published in 1885, this collection of poems is spoken largely in a child's voice and stays close to the scale of a nursery, a garden, a sickbed, and a window. The speaker plays at soldiers and sailors, watches shadows on the wall, travels in imagination while remaining indoors, and notices weather, bedtime, and the foreign children he has never met. Several poems remember illness and the narrowed world of a child kept in bed. Others turn outward to travel, the lamplighter, and the adult world glimpsed from a height. The book is lyric rather than narrative: a sequence of small scenes of play, fear, and looking.

Bound in green buckram blocked with a design. Dark red or blue slipcase.