A short, sunny memory of digging in the sand with a wooden spade, watching each hole fill up with seawater. Simple and vivid, it works well as a warm-up rhyme before a trip to the beach.
From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.
When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup.
In every hole the sea came up,
Till it could come no more.
About this poem
From A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this for A Child's Garden of Verses, published in 1885. He was an Edinburgh man, often ill as a boy, and the book is full of a child's-eye view of ordinary things. This one is just a small true fact about the beach: you dig a hole in wet sand, and the sea fills it up from below, every time.
Read it before a trip to the coast, or after one. Give a child a bucket and spade and let them prove it. The last two lines are the ones to slow down on. Dig, wait, watch the water rise. It works exactly as the poem says.
Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition