Whole Duty of Children
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1885
Four brisk lines laying out good manners, told with a perfectly straight face. It is short enough to become a running family joke as much as a poem.
From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.
A child should always say what's true
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table;
At least as far as he is able.
About this poem
Poem is exactly four lines: truth-telling, speaking when spoken to, table manners - matches the summary.
"Whole Duty of Children" is Stevenson being deliberately brief: four lines laying out the entire code of Victorian good behaviour, tell the truth, speak when spoken to, mind your table manners. It reads almost as a joke, the whole thing reduced to something a child could recite in one breath.
It shares that dry humour with "System", another short poem in the same book about goodness and its rewards.
Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition