🖋 🏡 ENVOY: A Living River by the Door (To Close the Homeschool Year)

August is coming to a close and this is our very last poem-of-the-week for the homeschool year. We hope you and your students have enjoyed visiting with fifty of our favorite friends, and we hope that some of them are now your friends as well. 😊

A new River Houses homeschool year will begin next month, but in the mean time, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) will provide the departing year with an ideal River Houses send-off.

Envoy

Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!

“Envoy” (or its French form, “Envoi”) is a generic title, not a specific one — it’s like “Appendix” or “Afterword.” An Envoy in the literary sense is a poetical passport-stamp or note of departure: a short verse that appears at the end of a longer work, wrapping up the whole and sending readers on their way.

As this River Houses year comes to a close, we wish all our readers and friends, by way of envoy, “Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, / A bin of wine, a spice of wit, / A house with lawns enclosing it, / A living river by the door, / A nightingale in the sycamore!”

What wonderful words and poetical productions will you and your students discover in the happy homeschool year ahead? 😊

❡ A living river by the door: If a special line or turn of phrase happens to strike you in one of our weekly poems, just copy it onto your homeschool bulletin board for a few days and invite your students to speak it aloud — that’s all it takes to begin a new poetical friendship and learn a few lovely words that will stay with you for life. 🏡

❡ This is a printable lesson: Down at the bottom of this post you’ll find a custom “Print” button that will let you create a neat and easy-to-read copy of this little lesson, and it will even let you resize or delete elements that you may not want or need (such as images or footnotes). Give it a try today! 🖨

❡ Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Robert Louis Stevenson) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. ✒️

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar to follow along with us as we visit fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year, and add your name to our River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox every week. 📫

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓

❡ Support our work: If you enjoy our educational materials, please support us by starting your regular Amazon shopping from our very own homeschool teaching supplies page. When you click through from our page, any purchase you make earns us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for helping us to keep going and growing! 🛒

❡ Join us! The aim of the River Houses project is to create a network of friendly local homeschool support groups — local chapters that we call “Houses.” Our first at-large chapter, Headwaters House, is now forming and is open to homeschoolers everywhere. Find out how to become one of our founding members on the Headwaters House membership page. 🏡