Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight make me a child again just for to-night!

These lines open Elizabeth Akers Allen’s immensely popular poem “Rock Me to Sleep,” first circulated in the late 1850s and widely reprinted in American newspapers and magazines during the Civil War era. Allen (often publishing as “Elizabeth Akers”) wrote the poem while still a young woman, and it quickly became a cultural touchstone—frequently recited, set to music, and quoted as an emblem of homesickness and longing for maternal comfort. The poem’s fame also led to long-running disputes over authorship and unauthorized reprints, a common problem for poets in the periodical press. The speaker’s plea to Time frames the poem as a nostalgic return to childhood security.

The speaker addresses Time as if it were a living force that might reverse its “flight,” asking not for literal immortality but for a temporary restoration of childhood. The urgency of “just for to-night!” suggests a moment of acute weariness or sorrow in adult life, when the burdens of responsibility and memory feel unbearable. By invoking childhood, the lines also invoke the emotional shelter associated with a mother’s presence—an imagined refuge from loss, anxiety, and the irreversibility of change. The poem’s enduring appeal lies in this concentrated fantasy of reprieve: a brief suspension of adulthood’s demands through the consolations of remembered intimacy and care.

1) “Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, / Make me a child again just for to-night.”
2) “Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight, / Make me a child again just for tonight.”
3) “Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, / Make me a child again, just for tonight.”