But I, when I undress me Each night, upon my knees Will ask the Lord to bless me With apple-pie and cheese.

This stanza is from Eugene Field’s humorous children’s verse “The Prayer,” a poem that playfully imitates the cadence and posture of a bedtime prayer. Field (1850–1895), a journalist and columnist best known for light verse about childhood, often blended sentiment with comic realism. Here he contrasts a child’s expected piety—kneeling to ask God for blessings—with a very earthly request: a favorite snack. The poem belongs to Field’s late‑19th‑century body of “poems of childhood,” written for popular readership and frequently reprinted in newspapers and in his collected volumes of verse.

The humor comes from the collision of sacred form and ordinary appetite. The speaker performs the ritual of prayer (“upon my knees”) but turns it toward a simple, sensory desire (“apple-pie and cheese”), suggesting that a child’s spirituality is sincere yet unselfconsciously practical. Field’s tone is affectionate rather than mocking: the line implies that innocence includes frankness about wants, and that devotion can coexist with everyday pleasures. More broadly, the stanza exemplifies Field’s talent for using nursery-rhyme rhythms to capture childhood’s logic—where comfort, food, and bedtime routines are as immediate as theology.