"The Gardener" by Robert Louis Stevenson is a poem from the collection A Child's Garden of Verses. It is written for an audience of children. The narrator of the poem is a young boy. We can tell that he is of the upper middle or upper classes as his family can afford a large garden, a gardener, and a cook.
The young boy wants to live in the moment and play and seems quite disappointed that the gardener is focused on his job and does not want to chat or play. Although Stevenson does not put it in these terms, we can see this as an example of a certain type of entitlement or privilege of a young, well-off boy whose perspective is quite narrowly limited to his own desire to be entertained. The boy resents the rules and necessities of the adult world.
The poem is organized into five quatrains rhymed AABB. The meter of the poem is iambic tetrameter. Generically, it is a "carpe diem" poem, arguing for enjoying the nice weather before the winter. As with the traditional carpe diem poem, which urges a woman to yield to sexual advances of a lover because life is short, the arguments appear on the surface plausible until one thinks about real consequences. Just as the young maidens who yielded up their virtue risked social ostracism, diseases, and pregnancy, so the gardener, if he stops working to play or leaves the shed unlocked so that the tools might get damaged or stolen, risks losing his job and livelihood. The gardener, after all, is not a spoiled rich child but a hardworking man in economically precarious circumstances (servants were not well paid in this period). Thus while a child reading the poem might sympathize with the narrator, as adults we can see that the actual situation is not simply one of adults being boring but of adults having responsibilities and of actions having consequences.
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