At the Sea-Side

Fiction | Poem | Middle Grade | Published in 1913

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

"My Shadow" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)

Stevenson published “My Shadow” along with “At the Sea-Side” and other poems in 1885 in his collection A Child’s Garden of Verses. As with “At the Sea-Side,” this poem also provides a child’s perspective of life. The speaker contemplates their shadow as an entity separate from themself, observing how this shadow likes to grow taller and shrink to near nothingness. The shadow sticks so close to the speaker that it’s obvious “he’s a coward you can see” (Line 11). At the poem’s conclusion, the shadow seems to be completely separated from the speaker as the shadow stays in bed in the morning while the speaker gets up to begin their day.

"Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1882)

“Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest” was first printed in Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island in 1882. Treasure Island is a tale of adventure with swashbuckling pirates and sailing to distant islands. The plot focuses on a teenage boy named Jim Hawkins and is often considered to be a coming-of-age story. This particular poem contains all of the typical tropes of a pirate adventure, including the call of “Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!” (Lines 2, 4) Though “At the Sea-Side” appeared in A Child’s Garden of Verses, with its focus on oceanic travel, the adventures of Treasure Island and “Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest” would have been equally as enthralling for a younger audience.

"Bed in Summer" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)

“Bed in Summer” was likewise published along with “At the Sea-Side” in Stevenson’s collection A Child’s Garden of Verses in 1885. Stevenson’s speaker, a child, compares having to go to bed at night in the wintertime to having to go to bed in the summer. They relate the difficulty of having to go to bed when it is still daylight out, when the world is still active and when all they want to do is play.

Further Literary Resources

"Stevenson Among the Balladeers" by Sean Pryor (2014).

Pryor analyzes ballads published by Stevenson in 1890, placing him within the “Victorian ballad revival.” Through analyzing these ballads, Pryor argues

Stevenson does not simply match the ballad’s ancient or naive poetics to the so-called savages of the South Seas, but instead that his prosody struggles with incompatible social and aesthetic values: both ancient and modern naivete and sophistication.

Although Pryor analyzes works from Stevenson published after A Child’s Garden of Verses (which contains “At the Sea-Side”), the article could more broadly provide valuable insight into Stevenson’s poetry.

"Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Seas Crossings" by Ann C Colley (2008).

Stevenson spent his last years living among and exploring the islands of the Pacific. Colley explores Stevenson’s confrontation with imperialism and colonialism in his writing and how Stevenson avoided the polarizing “us” vs. “them” mentality inherent in imperialism. Rather, Colley asserts, Stevenson “was more interested in the complex nature of the cultural exchanges between the Europeans and the native populations.” Stevenson incorporated these “contact zones” of “hybridized” European and native cultures into his writings. Stevenson’s love of exploration and the sea is exhibited through both Colley’s analysis as well as Stevenson’s poem “At the Sea-Side.”

"Robert Louis Stevenson’s Evolutionary Wordsworth" by Trenton Olsen (2016).

In his essay “Books Which Have Influenced Me” published in 1887, Stevenson acknowledged that Wordsworth impacted his writing. Through analyzing Stevenson’s own copy of Wordsworth’s collection of poems, Olsen aims to show precisely what this influence entailed. Olsen uses the marginalia added to the Wordsworthian volumes by Stevenson himself to better understand the connection between Stevenson’s and Wordsworth’s writings. Given the fact that Wordsworth was a Romantic poet and focused on including descriptions of nature in his poetry, it is no surprise that Stevenson also included nature descriptions in his poems as well (evident in “At the Sea-Side”), if indeed Wordsworth did have such a profound impact on his writing.

Listen to Poem

LibriVox Provides a Free Recording of “At the Sea-Side”

LibriVox, a group of international readers who create public domain recordings of texts, provides an audio version of Stevenson’s short children’s poem.