Bed in Summer

If you’re looking to start reading poetry regularly in your family, Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses is an excellent place to begin. You may be surprised at how some of the poems are already familiar to you!

The following poem is one of our favorites from the collection, and it comes first in the book. Perhaps your family has spent some time talking about that cruel reality of childhood summers: going to bed while the sun is still up.

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?

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Kelly Keller

Kelly Keller is the managing editor of Story Warren. She has her BS in Elementary Education from Messiah University and has taught various ages, but her favorite was worldview and literature with high school students. The “gap” in her resume is actually a window of eighteen years of homeschooling, which she recommends as an effective, though demanding, way of expanding one’s home library.

When she’s not behind her laptop, Kelly enjoys live music, baseball, reading great books, and traveling with her husband, David. Kelly hails from beautiful snowy New England, but after nearly two decades in North Carolina, she feels right at home.

She invites you to subscribe to her newsletter, On the Common, or to follow her on Twitter or Instagram.

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