Bed in Summer -- Robert Louis Stevenson

(Poem #290) Bed in Summer 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? -- Robert Louis Stevenson

A touch of nostalgia today - this poem charmed and enchanted me when I was a
child, with its hints of faraway lands and strange conditions. A funny
thing, though, was that while I could quote the first two verses from
memory, the very existence of the third came as a surprise to me. Nor was it
a pleasant surprise - while verses one and two have a delightful air of
bemusement, the last verse is, to put it quite frankly, whiny. It's
especially sad since the second verse would have been a fine (if somewhat
abrupt) ending, and left the whole a good (if not great) children's poem.

On the other hand, it is still a pretty nice poem, if a very 'children's'
one - the images manage to be quite evocative without being descriptive, and
the rhythms are satisfyingly strong and regular (something that matters a
lot when  you're a child - take a glance through any ten popular nursery
rhymes). I think Stevenson's fault at the end was an attempt to identify
with his audience; one that, quite sadly, misfired.

m.

Notes: From 'A Child's Garden of Verses', the first poem in the book, in
fact.

For a far better poem from the same source, see 'From a Railway Carriage'
poem #84

And  for the complete 'A Child's Garden of Verses', a set of XLI poems
ranging from the amazingly painful to the truly delightful, see
[broken link] http://geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/rls02.html#1