Katherine Mansfield

“ Gently weaving in the darkness,
She is like a wounded bird at rest on a pool.
Timidly, timidly she lifts her head from her wing
In the sky there are two stars
Floating, shining ...
O waters—do not cover me!
I would look long and long at those beautiful stars!
O my wings—lift me—lift me! ”

“ In my strong sweet perfume, the perfume of your kisses.
Long and long he will lie there ...
Laughing—not weeping.”
1911.
26
TO GOD THE FATHER
To the little, pitiful God I make my prayer,
The God with the long grey beard
And flowing robe fastened with a hempen girdle
Who sits nodding and muttering on the all-too-big throne of Heaven.
What a long, long time, dear God, since you set the stars in their places,
Girded the earth with the sea, and invented the day and night. ”

“ And shepherd-watch I keep.
If in the quiet vales they lie
I blow them up the steep.
Lo! In the tree-tops do I hide,
In every living thing;
On the moon’s yellow wings I glide,
On the wild rose I swing ”

“ Let’s pretend that we have wings
And can really truly fly
Over every sort of things
Up and up into the sky,
Where the sweet star children play—
It does seem a dreadful rule,
They must stay inside all day. ”

“ He would sit very still on the doorstep
And dream—Oh, that he had a friend!
Somebody to come when he called them,
Somebody to catch by the hand,
Somebody to sleep with at night time,
Somebody who’d quite understand. ”

“ To make you the loveliest curls, cabbage tree.
77
A FEW RULES FOR BEGINNERS
Babies must not eat the coal
And they must not make grimaces,
Nor in party dresses roll
And must never black their faces.
They must learn that pointing’s rude,
They must sit quite still at table,
And must always eat the food
Put before them—if they’re able.
If they fall, they must not cry,
Though it’s known how painful this is;
No—there’s always Mother by
Who will comfort them with kisses. ”

“ The world changed. The sound of the clock grew fainter,
Dwindled away, became a minute thing.
I whispered in the darkness, “If it stops, I shall die.”
1911.
19
THE GULF
A gulf of silence separates us from each other.
I stand at one side of the gulf, you at the other.
I cannot see you or hear you, yet know that you are there.
Often I call you by your childish name
And pretend that the echo to my crying is your voice.
How can we bridge the gulf? Never by speech or touch.
Once I thought we might fill it quite up with tears.
Now I want to shatter it with our laughter. ”

“ To hear and know themselves for these—
For these little voices: the bee, the fly,
The leaf that taps, the pod that breaks,
The breeze on the grass-tops bending by,
The shrill quick sound that the insect makes. ”

“ What might, in another writer of genius, have become poetry, Katherine Mansfield put into her stories.
Nevertheless, she had written and, at long intervals, continued to write poetry. Perhaps her poetry is not quite poetry, just as her prose is not quite prose. Certainly, whatever they are, they belong to the same order; they have the same simple and mysterious beauty, and they are, above all, the expression of the same exquisite spirit. To my sense they are unique.
Comparatively few of these poems have been published ”

“ Shadow children, thin and small,
Now the day is left behind,
You are dancing on the wall,
On the curtains, on the blind. ”

“ Though you can’t see its feet.
And when the dark is very big
And you’ve been having dreams,
Then Mother brings the candle in;
How friendly like it seems!
It’s only just for Mothers that
The candle Fairy comes ”

“ Flying with drooping wings.
Silent and solitary their ominous flight.
All day the triumphant sun with yellow banners
Warred and warred with the earth, and when she yielded
Stabbed her heart, gathered her blood in a chalice,
Spilling it over the evening sky.
When the dark plumaged birds go flying, flying,
Quiet lies the earth wrapt in her mournful shadow,
Her sightless eyes turned to the red sky
And the restlessly seeking birds.
1911.
22
VERY EARLY SPRING
The fields are snowbound no longer ”

“ The rhythm in it is not passionate enough,”
Said somebody. “I absolutely refuse...”
But he took off his socks and his shoes
And round her spun. “It’s like Hungarian fruit dishes
Hard and bright—a mechanical blue!” ”

“ Villa Pauline was a four-roomed cottage on the shore of the Mediterranean where we lived in 1916. For the whole of one week we made a practice of sitting together after supper at a very small table in the kitchen and writing verses on a single theme which we had chosen. It seems to me now almost miraculous that so exquisite a poem as, for instance, “Voices of the Air,” should have been thus composed. ”

“ Learns to open the front door.
And her Majesty—now six,
Can her shoestring neatly fix.
Babbles, Babbles, have a care,
You will soon put up your hair!
76
SONG OF THE LITTLE WHITE GIRL
Cabbage tree, cabbage tree, what is the matter?
Why are you shaking so? Why do you chatter?
Because it is just a white baby you see,
And it’s the black ones you like, cabbage tree?
Cabbage tree, cabbage tree, you’re a strange fellow
With your green hair and your legs browny-yellow.
Wouldn’t you like to have curls, dear, like me?
What! No one to make them? O poor cabbage tree! ”

“ Light as feathers the witches fly,
The horn of the moon is plain to see;
By a firefly under a jonquil flower
A goblin toasts a bumble-bee. ”

“ Hit her but did not kill.
“O my wings, lift me—lift me!
I am not dreadfully hurt!”
Down she dropped and was still.
Kind people come to the edge of the pool with baskets.
“Of course what the poor bird wants is plenty of food!”
Their bags and pockets are crammed almost to bursting
With dinner scrapings and scraps from the servants’ lunch.
Oh! how pleased they are to be really giving!
“In the past, you know you know, you were always so fly-away. ”

“ Outside the sky is light with stars; ”

“ But when he went away, we did not even wave.
1912.
31
THE SECRET
In the profoundest ocean
There is a rainbow shell,
It is always there, shining most stilly
Under the greatest storm waves
And under the happy little waves
That the old Greek called ‘ripples of laughter.’
And you listen, the rainbow shell
Sings—in the profoundest ocean.
It is always there, singing most silently!
1912.
32
SEA SONG
33
I will think no more of the sea! ”

“ O Patent-Leather-Slipper-Child,
My dear, I’m well content,
To have my daughter in my arms,
And not an ornament.
69
SONG OF KAREN, THE DANCING CHILD
(O little white feet of mine)
Out in the storm and the rain you fly;
(Red, red shoes the colour of wine)
Can the children hear my cry?
(O little white feet of mine)
Never a child in the whole great town ”

“ But we never really loved them
Till one day we left them lying
In the garden—through a hail-storm,
And we heard the poor dears crying.
Half-Past-Six said—“You’re a mother!
What if Mummy did forget you?”
So I said, “Well, you’re their Father.
Get them!” but I wouldn’t let you.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling inconsistences within poems were not changed, as they may be intentional.
Simple typographical errors were corrected.
Ellipses were retained as printed in the original book, whether mid-sentence, at the end of a line, or at the end of a sentence. ”

“ Grandmother laid down her knitting.
“Do tell us, dear.”
“Once upon a time there was a bad little girl
And her Mummy gave her the slipper, and that’s all.”
It was not a very special story.
But we pretended to be very pleased
And Grandmother gave him jumps on her lap.
10
THE MAN WITH THE WOODEN LEG
There was a man lived quite near us ”

“ He wanted her to write nothing but satirical prose. This treatment made her very reserved about her verses. Those she published in Rhythm appeared as translations from an imaginary Russian called Boris Petrovsky; those she published in The Athenaeum appeared over the pseudonym of Elizabeth Stanley. Her cousin, to whom this book is dedicated, was the only person to penetrate this latter disguise.
The poems have been roughly grouped in periods. Katherine Mansfield’s practice was suddenly to spend several days in writing poetry, and then to abandon poetry wholly for months and years together. ”