| My Shadow | |
|---|---|
| by Robert Louis Stevenson | |
| Country | Great Britain |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Shadows |
| Publication date | 1885 |
My Shadow is an 1885 poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. Among his most famous poems for children, [1] [2] it appeared in A Child's Garden of Verses in 1885. [3] [4]
It is written in iambic heptameter containing seven metrical feet per line.
On publication, the poem did not find favour with a reviewer in British Quarterly Review, who preferred The Hayloft, Farewell to the Farm, and The North-West Passage. [5] By the twentieth century, however, it had become sufficiently popular to be included in the syllabus of several elementary school in the United States, including 1918, [6] 1916, [7] and 1921. [8] In 1948, the U.S. President Harry S. Truman used the lines, "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" to refer to a Republican candidate "running along behind him." [9] [10]
A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and other European countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes.
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child's Garden of Verses.
An anapaest is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. In classical quantitative meters it consists of two short syllables followed by a long one; in accentual stress meters it consists of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. It may be seen as a reversed dactyl. This word comes from the Greek ἀνάπαιστος, anápaistos, literally "struck back" and in a poetic context "a dactyl reversed".
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A Child's Garden of Verses is an 1885 volume of 64 poems for children by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It has been reprinted many times, often in illustrated versions, and is considered to be one of the most influential children's works of the 19th century. The poems, which have been widely imitated, are written from the point of view of a child. Stevenson dedicated the collection to his childhood nurse, Alison Cunningham.
Iambic pentameter is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in each line. Rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called "feet". "Iambic" indicates that the type of foot used is the iamb, which in English is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. "Pentameter" indicates that each line has five "feet".
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Ding Dong School, billed as "the nursery school of the air", is a half-hour children's TV show which began on WNBQ-TV in Chicago, Illinois a few months before its four-year run on NBC. It is the earliest known preschool series to be produced in the United States, predating Romper Room by a year.
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