A child recites the tidy rules of being good and earning an orange, then tacks on a rather blunt line linking scruffiness to poverty. Short, but the moralising has aged oddly and is worth previewing.
From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.
Every night my prayers I say,
And get my dinner every day;
And every day that I've been good,
I get an orange after food.
The child that is not clean and neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,
He is a naughty child, I'm sure—
Or else his dear papa is poor.
About this poem
A Child's Garden of Verses was published in 1885. · Poem text confirms the sequence: prayers, dinner, an orange for good behaviour, then the twist ('naughty child... Or else his dear papa is poor').
"System" is one of the sharper poems in A Child's Garden of Verses, published in 1885. It reads like a little catechism: say your prayers, eat your dinner, get an orange for being good. Then Stevenson turns the joke on the grown-ups: the untidy child with all the toys isn't naughty at all, just poorer.
Read it lightly and let the last line land on its own.
Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition