Time to Rise Lyrics
Four lines, one visitor: a bird with a yellow bill hops onto the windowsill, cocks a shining eye and tells the sleepyhead to wake up. It is one of the shortest poems Robert Louis Stevenson wrote for children, and one of the funniest.
Time to Rise
A birdie with a yellow bill
Hopped upon the window sill,
Cocked his shining eye and said:
"Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-head!"
Printed from https://nurseryrhymes.co/time-to-rise/
- Type
- Poems for Children
- Written by
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Tune
- Spoken, with a small bird voice for the last line
- Best for ages
- 2 to 6 years
What Does Time to Rise Mean?
The surprise is who does the scolding. Usually a grown-up calls a child out of bed, but here a bird does it. The bird hops onto the sill, tilts its head so that one bright eye looks straight into the room, and asks "Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-head!", which is a chatty way of saying "Aren't you ashamed, you sleepyhead?" The bird is up and busy, and the child is still in bed.
The bird is no random choice. Many birds sing loudest at dawn, which is why a window can fill with song before the child is out of bed. Birds are among the first creatures awake, so a bird calling the child a sleepy-head is a joke that is also true to life.
The words are very simple. Cocked his eye means he tilted his head to look, and the sill is the ledge at the bottom of a window.
History and Origin
It came out in 1885 with the rest of Stevenson's children's poems, and it is one of the briefest of them. Read about him at The Land of Counterpane.
The poem has a counterpart in the same collection, My Shadow, whose last verse also ends with a sleepyhead, that time a shadow still in bed.
Learning Activities
- Wake-up bird: a grown-up taps lightly on a window or table and says the last line in a bird voice, then the child sits up.
- Morning listening: listen from the window the next morning and count how many different bird sounds there are.
- Make the bird: cut a bird from yellow and brown paper with a yellow bill, and put it on the windowsill.
- Your own visitor: think of another animal that might wake a sleepy child, and write one line of what it says.