Literary fame is a chancy thing. It comes and it goes, and no one is quite sure why or how. Before his death in Samoa at age 44, the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was as celebrated as any in his late-Victorian age. “Treasure Island,” “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” “Kidnapped”: Essays and stories with a scintillating prose poured out from him. In 1885, he added “A Child’s Garden of Verses” (1885), once among the best read volumes in the emerging canon of children’s books. Is it still? It ought to be. Here, in “Windy Nights” — a ballad-meter quatrain with a tetrameter couplet slapped on the end — he offers a sense of the noises a child hears in bed at night, the wind like a horseman pounding back and forth on the road.

Windy Nights
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Whenever the moon and stars are set,      
     Whenever the wind is high,      
All night long in the dark and wet,      
     A man goes riding by.      
Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?      
      
Whenever the trees are crying aloud,      
     And ships are tossed at sea,      
By, on the highway, low and loud,      
     By at the gallop goes he.
By at the gallop he goes, and then      
By he comes back at the gallop again. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of a North Carolina poet, Sally Thomas. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.