Stevenson imagines sleep as a nightly solo journey to a strange country the child can never quite remember by morning, which is a fair description of how dreaming actually feels to a small child. Its unhurried pace and the title's now-common phrase for sleep make it a solid bedtime read.
From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.
From breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.
All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do—
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.
The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.
Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.
About this poem
From A Child's Garden of Verses, 1885
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this for A Child's Garden of Verses, his 1885 book of poems about childhood. The land of Nod is an old joke name for sleep. It comes from the Book of Genesis, where Cain is sent to live in the land of Nod, and English writers from the 1700s onwards played on the word 'nod' to mean dropping off. Stevenson takes the joke seriously and treats sleep as a real country you travel to alone each night, with its own food, its own sights and the odd frightening thing.
This is a lights-out poem. Read it slowly at the very end of the day, when your child is already tucked in. In the poem the child is always home again by morning, so it makes a calm place to stop and turn off the lamp.
Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition