Robert Louis Stevenson

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 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?

It's a children's poem, one that I knew well growing up. I also read "Treasure Island" as a child by Robert Louis Stevenson and many other books by this author. Reading him always brings those memories back and all of the movies that were made of "Treasure Island". I was lucky in that the library was full of his books and no one minded when I checked them out as some of them were in the adult section. It took me many years to understand why I found "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" so horrifying. It took a therapist to tie the alcoholic father and the main character who drank a substance that turned him into a monster as something that was too close to reality for me as a child.

In Korea, the time does not change so daylight savings time is something that is not a concern. Still, I remember as a child going to bed in the daytime when I desperately wanted to stay up and play some more. Now, of course I go to bed when I want or need to. In the United States few people were walking on the street anymore anyhow. It was the loud cars that raced up and down the streets. My apartment here is not close to the street, but I can still hear the buses running all night. The university is across the street and not that many students have cars here.

My apartment is surrounded by parks created by a large corporation who has a office next door and the parks consists of a soccer field, basketball court, tennis courts and a place to ride bikes. They often play games at night. The gardens are beautiful and there is a place for a picnic. It was there that I discovered that there are cuckoo birds. I was astonished for it sounded as if the surrounded woods were filled with cuckoo clocks. I always thought they made up that bird. Korea is full of birds and it is fun to watch and hear them.

Sometimes reading a poem written so many years ago is like opening a time capsule. It is hearing and feeling someone who has since past away. I can still feel the delight Stevenson must have still felt as an adult in looking at life through the eyes of a child.

I think it is important to read children's literature even as adults and certainly poetry meant for children. It is important that we never lose that delight that Stevenson so evidently had and to remember the poems that we read and enjoyed as children. I read these poems to my children and grandchildren myself. I still read them to myself and I hope we all still read them as we read Stevenson's books over and over again.