Poems

Transcriber’s Note: Cover created by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain.
By the same author :
THE GARDEN PARTY THE DOVES’ NEST BLISS
POEMS
BY KATHERINE MANSFIELD
LONDON: CONSTABLE & CO. LTD.
First published 1923
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD. THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, GLASGOW
TO ELIZABETH OF THE GERMAN GARDEN WHO LOVED CERTAIN OF THESE POEMS AND THEIR AUTHOR
In her Journal, on January 22, 1916, Katherine Mansfield told her plans as her writer to her dead brother. She wanted to pay “a sacred debt” to her country, New Zealand, because “my brother and I were born there.” “Then,” she continued, “I want to write poetry.”
“I feel always trembling on the brink of poetry,” she whispers to her brother. “The almond tree, the birds, the little wood where you are, the flowers you do not see, the open window out of which I lean and dream that you are against my shoulder, and the times that your photograph ‘looks sad.’ But especially I want to write a kind of long elegy to you ... perhaps not in poetry. No, perhaps in prose. Almost certainly in a kind of special prose .”
This “special prose ” was the peculiar achievement of her genius. It seems to me that nothing like Prelude or At the Bay or The Voyage or The Doves’ Nest had ever been written in English before. English prose was turned to a new and magical use, made crystal-clear, and filled with rainbow-beauties that are utterly indefinable. What might, in another writer of genius, have become poetry, Katherine Mansfield put into her stories.