When “A Child’s Garden of Verses” appeared in 1885, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was already failing, as the ups and downs of his consumption would lead to his death from a stroke at age 44. The Sun has already run two poems — “Windy Nights” and “Winter Time” — from the book (along with his adult “Alcaics” in our week of Greek and Latin meters in English verse).

Here in the middle of the hot season, perhaps it’s time for another from his children’s classic — this one titled “Bed in Summer.” We previously called “A Child’s Garden of Verses” the most widely read and influential volume of children’s poetry after “Mother Goose,” and on the strength of it and his numerous other works Stevenson needs to be restored to a popular place in public esteem. His reputation is rising from the 20th century’s critical dismissal of his work, but the advance is moving too slowly. Stevenson deserves our reading.

In “Bed in Summer” he gives us iambic tetrameter quatrains, rhymed in couplets, to express a child’s summer frustration at being put to bed while the sun is still shining in the long summer evenings. “And does it not seem hard to you, / When all the sky is clear and blue,” he complains, “And I should like so much to play, / To have to go to bed by day?”