Summer Poems

The change in seasons and Daylight Savings Time can be a bit confusing to young children as they awake in darkness during winter months and go to bed in what seems to be daylight in the summer when they would rather be playing outside. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894) wrote a summer poem, Bed in Summer, expressing this perplexing thought in the mind of a young child.

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?

~ R. L. Stevenson ~