When “A Child’s Garden of Verses” appeared in 1885, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was already failing, as the ups and downs of his consumption would lead to his death from a stroke at age 44. The Sun has already run two poems — “Windy Nights” and “Winter Time” — from the book (along with his adult “Alcaics” in our week of Greek and Latin meters in English verse). Here in the middle of the hot season, perhaps it’s time for another from his children’s classic — this one titled “Bed in Summer.” We previously called “A Child’s Garden of Verses” the most widely read and influential volume of children’s poetry after “Mother Goose,” and on the strength of it and his numerous other works Stevenson needs to be restored to a popular place in public esteem. His reputation is rising from the 20th century’s critical dismissal of his work, but the advance is moving too slowly. Stevenson deserves our reading.In “Bed in Summer” he 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?”Bed in Summerby Robert Louis StevensonIn 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?___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
