The Swing

by HRM Deborah

This poem was one of my favorites, I actually had to recite it by memory for an seventh grade English class. What made it more interesting, I was new to the school and the book the poem came from had also been a school book for my teacher; she told me this after I had recited the poem.

You guessed it, I got and A; while the other children in the class loved it as well.

The book, I learned this poem from I was told was also a first edition of the “Children’s Garden of Verses," given to me by my grandmother, sent from Palestine; when I was a young girl as a gift. Sad to say it was later stolen, but I never forgot the lithograph style pictures and many of the children’s poems.

As for a child liking swing’s I did as well, for I was a bit of an outdoor person, as a child. Mother always said, sunshine makes one more healthy and peaceful on my part.

Furthermore, since my childhood was before the age of all the video games and where I lived before the seventh grade class, being outdoors; I built a tree house to fit in a peach tree, also took and old child’s table that the wood was still good and made the best I could a Japanese bridge over a peach tree circler watering ditch, because I thought it would be beautiful.

Nevertheless, my mother also did try to give me good memories, the best she could for it always seemed important to her.

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside--

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown--
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

-Robert Lewis Stevenson