"Read a good poem...."

Upon visiting my friend at Cottage Blessings, I was reminded of the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson in a piece blogged there not too long ago. In following a classical education, we pay attention to the discipline of memorization and in the earliest years Stevenson's work provides many wonderful verses for the children to put to memory.

We have generally utilized Laura Berquist's The Harp & the Laurel Wreath for this purpose; it contains a wide range of classic poems and prose pieces, covering kindergarten well up through high school. However, when first starting out my little ones with Stevenson, I wanted to have a colorful and attractive presentation of his work, and this I found quite by accident in a book I sent my parents out to search for one day. They returned home with a lovely version of Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, illustrated by Joanna Isles. All our children have loved this version (and so does their mom :) While not as easy to find as it use to be, it is well worth the search.

Windy Nights
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by.
Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?

Whenever the trees are crying aloud,
And ships are tossed at sea,
By, on the highway, low and loud,
By at the gallop goes he.
By at the gallop he goes, and then
By he comes back at the gallop again.

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe