Robert Louis Stevenson's "Winter-Time"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2024

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is a master-class in elementary poetic instruction. Happy reading.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.4	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, December 2, 2024.
0:09.2	Today's poem comes from Robert Lewis Stevenson and his beloved,
0:14.4	priceless collection of poetry, a child's garden of verses.
0:19.5	It's called Wintertime. It is finally the month of December,
0:25.3	and though it is not officially winter yet, I won't be for another two weeks or so,
0:31.1	it is getting cool even where I live, and it never gets cool where I live.
0:38.0	So it seemed appropriate to lean into the winter theme early here to kick off this month of growing anticipation for cold weather and wintertime festivities with Christmas and the new year, fast approaching.
0:53.7	And it's always worth revisiting a child's garden of verses this collection of poetry for children,
1:00.4	about children that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote.
1:04.5	It can be really easy to dismiss these kinds of poems as some sort of light verse that is less sophisticated and therefore less
1:15.1	important than the work of adults aimed at adults. And I think that is a grave mistake.
1:22.3	There's something essential, indispensable about poetry like these verses from Stevenson, particularly because
1:32.0	it's important to remember that one has to live in order for metaphor to be meaningful.
1:40.9	The points of reference in comparative language, analogy, simile, metaphor, require a collection of experiences and observations.
1:53.3	If I've never seen a boomerang before, then comparing something to a boomerang will be meaningless to me. In fact, it will lead me
2:03.6	away from meaning and understanding into the opposite of that. And so children's verse is important
2:12.8	because it meets children where they are experientially, as we'll see in even the opening lines of this poem.
2:20.3	There's some beautiful metaphorical language, analogical language right out of the gate and it
2:25.2	continues throughout. But it's domestic. It is every day. And yet it's showing, it's revealing
2:32.2	the connections between those things, the taking the familiar
2:37.0	that we know and using it, offering it up as a tool. Tool sounds maybe to self-serving or mercenary
	...

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