✦ A Classic Poem ✦
Why should a child go to bed while the birds are still hopping and the sky is still blue? Every child who has ever been sent to bed on a summer evening knows this feeling.
Read aloud by Storyland Classics ✦ 58 seconds ✦ Watch on YouTube
✦ The Poem ✦
by Robert Louis Stevenson, from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). Public domain.
In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see The birds still hopping on the tree, Or hear the grown-up people’s feet Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you, When all the sky is clear and blue, And I should like so much to play, To have to go to bed by day?
✦ About the Poem ✦
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is best known for Treasure Island and Kidnapped, but A Child’s Garden of Verses, published in 1885, may be his most loved book. He was often ill as a boy in Edinburgh and spent long days in bed, and these poems remember childhood from the inside, in a child’s own voice.
Stevenson grew up in Scotland, so far north that winter mornings stay dark and summer evenings stay light until very late. The poem turns that simple fact into one of childhood’s great injustices, and it ends with a question aimed straight at the listener.
✦ Talk About It ✦