Four lines are all Stevenson needs to turn a book of verses into a time machine. The speaker addresses his mother directly and suggests that when she reads his rhymes, she will be doing more than reading. She will be listening for the child he used to be. The central idea is that poetry can keep the past alive, and that the person who loves us best is the one who can hear it. Where other readers see words on a page, a mother may hear "the little feet along the floor."
The opening, "You too, my mother, read my rhymes," is quiet but carefully pitched. "You too" places her among all the other readers, one more person holding the book. The next line then sets her apart, because her reason for reading is different: "For love of unforgotten times." Other readers might read for entertainment or curiosity, but she reads out of love and memory. The word "rhymes" is also telling. Stevenson could have written "poems" or "verses," but "rhymes" sounds small and nursery-like, a little modest, and it prepares us for the childhood world the poem ends in.
"Unforgotten" is the most interesting word in the poem. He could have written "remembered," which would be simpler. But "unforgotten" suggests that the times were always in danger of slipping away and have been held on to deliberately. It is a negative built from a negative, and it sounds like something kept safe through effort, which fits a mother's memory of her child's early years. The line also does something playful with sound, since "rhymes" and "times" are the poem's first rhyme pair. Verse and time are tied together by sound before the poem has finished saying that verse can reach back through time.
The second couplet moves from abstract memory to something physical. "You may chance to hear once more" is deliberately tentative. The word "may" and the phrase "chance to" admit that this is a hope and not a promise, and that a poem cannot truly bring the past back. "Once more" quietly admits the loss, because we only hear something "once more" when it has stopped. Then comes the image that carries the whole poem: "the little feet along the floor." It is a synecdoche, with the feet standing for the whole child, and it appeals to hearing instead of sight. We are asked to imagine the patter of small steps in a house, a sound a parent might notice a hundred times a day without thinking, until it is gone. "Little" gives the line its tenderness, and "along the floor" gives it motion, the feeling of a child crossing a room.
There is a gentle twist in who those feet belong to. They are the speaker's own, yet he describes them as his mother would hear them, from outside and from above. The grown man writing the poem has become a third person in her memory, and the child he was exists now only in her ear. This is why the poem feels affectionate and a little sad at once. He is giving her a present, and he knows the present points to something that cannot be returned.
The form suits this restraint. The poem is two rhyming couplets (*rhymes/times*, *more/floor*) in smooth, eight-syllable lines with a steady iambic beat. The final line, "The LIT-tle FEET a-LONG the FLOOR," has a rhythm that almost imitates what it describes, even and light, like small steps crossing a room. The rhymes are plain and complete, with no strain, so the poem sounds as natural as something said aloud. The closing couplet also feels settled, as though the speaker has said what he wanted and stopped.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It reads like a dedication, a small offering to one particular reader, and it shows what reading can be for someone who loves the writer. In just four lines it gives a simple picture of why poetry matters: it can make an absent sound briefly present. Its modesty is part of its force, because it makes no grand claim, only a hope that a mother might "chance to hear" her child again.