My Shadow

One of my earliest memories was that of sitting on my mother's lap listening to the words from Robert Louis Stevenson's My Shadow. She read it from the armchair of the living room in the old house on our little farm in Iowa. I remember still that it was in the morning after my three older brothers had climbed on board the yellow country school bus - that was in 1954 and I was five years old. It was only then that I had my mother to myself. 

Later, I memorized the poem because my mother had told me how, when she was a little girl, her mother had read it to her and she had committed it to memory. I felt it was in some way my duty to follow suit. The poem still occasionally surfaces in my thoughts and did so again last week when my daughter Sara sent me the photo she snapped at the family cabin in Pine, Arizona. "Look at the shadow's Dad", were the words in her text. I did so and once again I was on my mother's lap in the armchair of the living room in the old house on our little farm in Iowa. 

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,

And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;

And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow―

Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;

For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,

And he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all.

He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,

And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.

He stays so close beside me, he's a coward you can see;

I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me?

One morning, very early, before the sun was up,

I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;

But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleep-head,

Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.  

The Golden Book of Poetry (1947)