Windy Nights

Robert Louis Stevenson

Teacher card

Published: 1885, in A Child's Garden of Verses
Length: 12 lines, 82 words, 1 word in 27 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 3–4. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: wind
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

Whenever the moon and stars are set,Whenever the wind is high,All night long in the dark and wet,A man goes riding by.Late in the night when the fires are out,Why does he gallop and gallop about?

Whenever the trees are crying aloud,And ships are tossed at sea,By, on the highway, low and loud,By at the gallop goes he.By at the gallop he goes, and thenBy he comes back at the gallop again.

Robert Louis Stevenson (died 1894), A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), lines 541–553 of Project Gutenberg ebook #25609. Public domain in Australia: the author died before 1955. Copied word for word and checked against the ebook.

What to do with it

One link and one task line for each activity. Send a student the one you want them to do, or print this page and hand it round; each link has a QR code.

Its lines are dealt for the sky in the weather poemsin weatherline · 12 lines · about 5–10 min
Task for students (you can change the sentence before you print; nothing is saved)See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
weatherline.popplepoetry.com/sources#rl-windy

Send the whole hand-out

This page’s link. Students open it, read the text and pick what to do; nothing asks them to sign in.

Link for the whole text

https://popplepoetry.com/find/stevenson-windy-nights · popplepoetry.com