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Home  »  A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods  »  XXXVI. “My house, I say”

Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894). A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods. 1913.

XXXVI. “My house, I say”

MY house, I say. But hark to the sunny doves

That make my roof the arena of their loves,

That gyre about the gable all day long

And fill the chimneys with their murmurous song:

Our house, they say; and mine, the cat declares

And spreads his golden fleece upon the chairs;

And mine the dog, and rises stiff with wrath

If any alien foot profane the path.

So, too, the buck that trimmed my terraces,

Our whilom gardener, called the garden his;

Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abode

And his late kingdom, only from the road.