DESERT ISLAND POEM 1

Perhaps the most potent power of poetry is its ability to evoke emotion and my initial experience of this truism came from listening to my mother reading aloud from A Child’s Garden of Verses.

 

I never liked the poem when I was a child, for it brought me no comfort whatsoever, but I realise now exactly why it lingered in my memory. It was the words - not their meanings, just the words, and their melodic quality and the simplicity of the imagery. 

 

Doubtless I came to appreciate it so much more when I became old enough to go to bed in summer when it was dark!
 

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candlelight
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