Question

summary Of poem a child thought​

Answer 1

What is a summary of the poem "A Child's Thought" by Robert Louis Stevenson?

The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world.

In the first stanza, the child, on going to bed, imagines castles, dragons, magic fruits, and gallant horsemen. In the second stanza, the child wakes up. The objects he had imagined as enchanted and part of his medieval fairyland are now ordinary, everyday objects. For instance, the castle has become a chair, and the horsemen have become a pair of boots. The "blue" streams he imagined are now a bath and watering can. By light of day, he can no longer return to his imagined world.

This is a very simple poem, written in rhyming couplets from the point-of-view of a child. Some complexity is introduced, however, in the two repeated lines, "at seven, when I go to bed," and "at seven, when I wake again." Does the "seven" refer to the child's age, when he goes to bed and rises, or both? This is up to the reader to decide, but it is likely Stevenson meant both.

Answer 2

Answer:

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The first stanza is filled with delightful images from the dreams of a seven-year-old child. These images are made up of scenes of adventure, similar to those which a child is likely to have read about in fairy tales. In his dreams, this child of the first stanza finds all sorts of adventures "so clearly in [his] head." These images contain dragons, castles, and all sorts of magic and enchanted towers.

The second stanza tells us what the same child experiences when he wakes up in the morning. When he opens his eyes, the magic is gone and the castle in his dreams is now just a chair. The fairies from his dreams have now disappeared and all the magical items that were part of his experience while sleeping have taken on an everyday, mundane appearance. The horsemen of his dreams are now ordinary boots, and the streams he saw while sleeping are "now a bath and water-can." In other words, he has come back to reality, and the line "I seek the magic land in vain" tells us that he's not happy about it; that he wishes he could have stayed in his dream world of magic and adventure.

There are two possible ways to read this poem. Firstly, it can be taken in the literal sense, as a child wishing to go back to the world of his dreams. On the other hand, it can also be argued that this poem is written from the perspective of an adult who is missing the overall magic of childhood.