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Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Born on November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, Scotland, Robert Louis Stevenson was a representative of neo-romanticism during the Modernist period. Though largely dismissed during much of the 20th century, he remains a favorite author of children's verse and is among the 25 most translated writers in the world...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Illness
A Litany in Time of Plague
by Thomas Nashe
Bedside
by William Olsen
Breathing
by Josephine Dickinson
Evening
by Gail Mazur
Having it Out with Melancholy
by Jane Kenyon
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
by W. H. Auden
Mastectomy
by Wanda Coleman
Sick
by Shel Silverstein
The Embrace
by Mark Doty
The Land of Counterpane
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Subalterns
by Thomas Hardy
The Transparent Man
by Anthony Hecht
Tubes
by Donald Hall
Units
by Albert Goldbarth
Visits to St. Elizabeths
by Elizabeth Bishop
Waking in the Blue
by Robert Lowell
When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
by John Milton
Poems About Birth and Parenting
A Woman Waits for Me
by Walt Whitman
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
by Galway Kinnell
Central Park, Carousel
by Meena Alexander
Curriculum Vitae
by Lisel Mueller
Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta
by Reetika Vazirani
Gods
by Michael Redhill
Honey
by Arielle Greenberg
Infant Joy
by William Blake
Morning Song
by Sylvia Plath
The Author to Her Book
by Anne Bradstreet
The Mother
by Gwendolyn Brooks
Tract
by William Carlos Williams
You Begin
by Margaret Atwood
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The Sick Child  
by Robert Louis Stevenson

CHILD.
O Mother, lay your hand on my brow!
O mother, mother, where am I now?
Why is the room so gaunt and great? 
Why am I lying awake so late?

MOTHER.
Fear not at all: the night is still.
Nothing is here that means you ill -
Nothing but lamps the whole town through,
And never a child awake but you.

CHILD.
Mother, mother, speak low in my ear,
Some of the things are so great and near,
Some are so small and far away,
I have a fear that I cannot say,
What have I done, and what do I fear,
And why are you crying, mother dear?

MOTHER.
Out in the city, sounds begin
Thank the kind God, the carts come in!
An hour or two more, and God is so kind,
The day shall be blue in the window-blind,
Then shall my child go sweetly asleep,
And dream of the birds and the hills of sheep.
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