A simple explanation of day and night circling the globe, following the sun from an English garden to children waking on the other side of the world. A gentle, factual idea wrapped in a rhyme.
From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.
The sun is not a-bed, when I
At night upon my pillow lie;
Still round the earth his way he takes,
And morning after morning makes.
While here at home, in shining day,
We round the sunny garden play,
Each little Indian sleepy-head
Is being kissed and put to bed.
And when at eve I rise from tea,
Day dawns beyond the Atlantic Sea;
And all the children in the West
Are getting up and being dressed.
About this poem
Poem: the sun 'is not a-bed' at night and 'still round the earth his way he takes, and morning after morning makes' - supports the explanation given.
"The Sun Travels" is Stevenson working out, in a child's logic, why day and night happen at all: the sun never actually goes to bed, it just moves on to wake somebody else while we sleep.
A nice one to read at bedtime, looking out at the dark together.
Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition