Poetry Month Tuesday

With the longer days, if not the temperatures of spring upon us, this poem seems just right for bed time reading.

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?


Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses is available for free download from Project Gutenberg. First published n 1885 as Penny Whistles it has been reissued many times and poems like Summer Bedtime appear in hundreds of poetry collections.