Bed in Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson

[conuly]

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?

Poem

Today's Calvin and Hobbes

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

That Stevenson poem has always been one of my favorites. I'd loved it for years before I understood how far north he lived. In a Glasgow winter, it's dark at 3:30 in the afternoon. Here in Boston it's 4:30. Acelightning lived somewhere people thought "if you were active after dark you had to be working for the devil." I've seen the assumption that if you were out after dark you were going to get run over. Or that if you were out after 9, at any time of year, you were up to no good. But nobody ever tried to make me to go bed at nightfall in winter.

[conuly]

You'd never be awake if they did.

[acelightning73]

My family was mostly from the BOston area. So they had inherited puritan moral beliefs. The human body was shameful, and certain parts of it weren't meant to be visible to the public. "If we were meant to prance around naked, we'd be born that way!" And midnight was the witching hour - when demons came out to tempt humans to sin. With my father working nights, I could ask my mom to "let me stay up until daddy comes home". That was okay, and sometimes my dad would read me a story, or sing to me (he had a lovely deep baritone singing voice and and a pleasant speaking voice.) And then staying up to watch the Fourth of July fireworks, or staying up till midnight on New Year's Eve = what a thrill for a little kid!