Today’s Poem: Bed in Summer
Robert Louis Stevenson and a child’s experience
Bed in Summer
by Robert Louis Stevenson
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?
When A Child’s Garden of Verses appeared in 1885, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was already failing, as the damage to his body from his consumption would lead to his death from a stroke at age forty-four.
As we noted here at Poems Ancient and Modern when we discussed his poem “Requiem,” Stevenson has faded in odd ways from literary memory over the past fifty years. His 1886 novella, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, remains on lists of classic horror tales — its bifurcated central character surviving in popular imagination alongside such other gaslight-era creations as Sherlock Holmes (1887) and Count Dracula (1897). But his young-person novels Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886) no longer seem to have the same purchase on public memory that they once did, and A Child’s Garden of Verses is not what it once was: the most widely read and influential volume of children’s poetry after Mother Goose.
As part of our revival of Stevenson, we look today (as one of our lighter Wednesday offerings) at one of the poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses — appropriately, for the beginning of June, “Bed in Summer.” Here, Stevenson gives us iambic tetrameter quatrains, rhymed in couplets, to express a child’s summer frustration at being put to bed while the sun is still shining in the long summer evenings. “And does it not seem hard to you, / When all the sky is clear and blue,” he complains, “And I should like so much to play, / To have to go to bed by day?”
A little twee, as children’s verse too often is, but not the worst of tweedom. And Stevenson captures a genuine sense of the unfairness of being sent to bed at night when it isn’t night.
News
• With this poem, we’re trying out something that a few people have requested — opening with the poem, followed by the discussion, rather than the reverse order we had been using. Let us know in the comments which you prefer.
Yes, I like the poem-first order better.
Given that I never read lntroductions to novels until after I've finished the book (but often read them afterwards—I'm not a bad student, just a pigheaded one), I'm fine with having the poem first. When you really get into the structure of the poem, too, it's helpful to have read the poem first for context, but then to read it again with an idea what to look for.
Regardless of where you might have said it, "not the worst of tweedom" made me laugh.