Two children build a ship from back-bedroom chairs and sail it all afternoon on imaginary billows. A small tumble ends the game, but the poem's real subject is how convincing a game of pretend can be.
From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.
We built a ship upon the stairs
All made of the back-bedroom chairs,
And filled it full of sofa pillows
To go a-sailing on the billows.
We took a saw and several nails,
And water in the nursery pails;
And Tom said, "Let us also take
An apple and a slice of cake;"—
Which was enough for Tom and me
To go a-sailing on, till tea.
We sailed along for days and days
And had the very best of plays;
But Tom fell out and hurt his knee,
So there was no one left but me.
About this poem
Full text checked against Stevenson's original: chairs for the ship, pillows filled in, a saw, nails, water, an apple and a slice of cake taken aboard. · Confirmed as one of the 64 poems in the 1885 first edition of A Child's Garden of Verses.
Two children turn a staircase into a ship, chairs for a hull, sofa pillows heaped in below, and stock it with the odd mix of things a voyage needs: a saw, some nails, an apple. It's one of the 64 poems in Stevenson's 1885 collection A Child's Garden of Verses, and it's written right down at a child's height. Read it sitting on real stairs, if you have any handy.
Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition