Stevenson turns a stack of hay into a mountain range worth exploring, naming peaks like Mount Rusty-Nail as he goes. It has the breathless joy of real childhood play and rewards an eager, climbing voice.
From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.
Through all the pleasant meadow-side
The grass grew shoulder-high,
Till the shining scythes went far and wide
And cut it down to dry.
Those green and sweetly smelling crops
They led in waggons home;
And they piled them here in mountain tops
For mountaineers to roam.
Here is Mount Clear, Mount Rusty-Nail,
Mount Eagle and Mount High;—
The mice that in these mountains dwell,
No happier are than I!
Oh, what a joy to clamber there,
Oh, what a place for play,
With the sweet, the dim, the dusty air,
The happy hills of hay!
About this poem
Poem describes grass cut and dried, then 'led in waggons home' and 'piled...in mountain tops', matching the described mound and its use as a play mountain.
"The Hayloft" catches a farm at haymaking time: the grass cut, dried, carted home and piled into a great mound in the barn. For Stevenson's narrator it stops being hay at all and turns into a mountain to climb and jump from.
A good one for anyone who has ever turned a sofa cushion pile into an adventure.
Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition