My Shadow
Robert Louis Stevenson
Teacher card
- Published
- 1885, in A Child's Garden of Verses
- Length
- 16 lines, 187 words, 1 word in 37 is long
- Year band
- Reading load: Years 3–4. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
- Themes
- birthday
- Time
- 5–10 min, depending on the activity
The text
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.
The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,And he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all.
He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.He stays so close beside me, he's a coward you can see;I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!
One morning, very early, before the sun was up,I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.
Robert Louis Stevenson (died 1894), A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), lines 778–798 of Project Gutenberg ebook #25609. Public domain in Australia: the author died before 1955. Copied word for word and checked against the ebook.
What to do with it
- Its lines are dealt for names in posy cardsin posy · 16 lines · about 5–10 min
See how posy takes lines from this poem, then make a card for someone using them.
posy.popplepoetry.com/sources#rl-shadow
Send the whole hand-out
https://popplepoetry.com/find/stevenson-my-shadow · popplepoetry.com