Katherine Mansfield / The Storm

The Storm 

by Katherine Mansfield
BIOGRAPHY

I ran to the forest for shelter,

Breathless, half sobbing

I put my arms round a tree

Pillowed my head against the rough bark

Protect me, I said. I am a lost child.

But the tree showered silver drops on my face and hair.

A wind sprang up from the ends of the earth

It lashed the forest together

A huge green wave thundered and burst over my head.

I prayed, implored, "Please take care of me!"

But the wind pulled at my cloak and the rain beat upon me.

Little rivers tore up the ground and swamped the bushes.

A frenzy possessed the earth: I felt that the earth was drowning

In a bubbling cavern of space. I alone--

Smaller than the smallest fly--was alive and terrified.

Then for what reason I know not, I became triumphant.

Well kill me – I cried – and ran out into the open.

But the storm ceased: the sun spread his wings

And floated serene in the silver pool of the sky.

I put my hands over my face: I was blushing

And the trees swung together and delicately laughed.

Katherine Mansfield / Loneliness

Loneliness 

by Katherine Mansfield
BIOGRAPHY

Now it is Loneliness who comes at night

Instead of Sleep, to sit beside my bed.

Like a tired child I lie and wait her tread,

I watch her softly blowing out the light.

Motionless sitting, neither left or right

She turns, and weary, weary droops her head.

She, too, is old; she, too, has fought the fight.

So, with the laurel she is garlanded.

Through the sad dark the slowly ebbing tide

Breaks on a barren shore, unsatisfied.

A strange wind flows... then silence. I am fain

To turn to Loneliness, to take her hand,

Cling to her, waiting, till the barren land

Fills with the dreadful monotone of rain.

Unknown poems by Katherine Mansfield found in a Chicago library

Katherine Mansfield
Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas

Unknown poems 

by Katherine Mansfield 

found in a Chicago library

BIOGRAPHY

‘I couldn’t believe my eyes’ says Mansfield scholar as she uncovers a cache of ‘literary gold’

Cameron Robertson
Thursday 11 June 2015 10.00 BST

Nearly 30 unknown poems by Katherine Mansfield have been discovered in a US library, giving fresh insight into the writer’s most painful and difficult period, the evidence for which she had later destroyed.

Gerri Kimber, senior lecturer in English at the University of Northampton and chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society, made the discovery at Chicago’s Newberry Library in May this year. The collection’s significance had remained undetected until now because it was marked with a name similar to the New Zealand-born writer’s previously published poems.

“I had already looked at the Newberry’s Mansfield collection, and the folder said, ‘The Earth Child and other poems’. The poem ‘The Earth-Child in the Grass’ (its full title) had been published already,” said Kimber, who was attending a conference about Mansfield. “I had three days to spare so I wanted to go through every single thing the Newberry has pertaining to Mansfield. I thought, ‘I don’t recognise this one. Or this one. Or this one …’ I couldn’t believe my eyes!”

Kimber, series editor of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, soon realised the folder in fact contained 26 unpublished poems (alongside a further nine that had been published already), two handwritten letters from Mansfield to a publisher, Mansfield’s calling card, and an auction dealer’s sale entry for the entire collection.

“Between 1909 to 1911 she destroyed as much personal material as she could find, I think because she was embarrassed and possibly ashamed of much of her conduct,” said Kimber. “We know she once smoked hashish with Aleister Crowley, had one – possibly two – abortions, as well as a traumatic stillbirth alone in Bavaria in June 1909, and an intense affair with a Polish émigré Floryan Sobieniowski, and then another affair when back in England in 1910, with young schoolmaster William Orton. This was a really difficult time for her. She was addicted to Veronal [barbiturates], and experimenting with life, her sexuality, all sorts. You could call this period hedonistic. As a result, uncovering any material from this period is literary gold for Mansfield scholars.”

In 1909, Mansfield was sent to Bavaria by her mother who believed a bizarre water treatment would turn her daughter away from lesbianism, explained Kimber. “I think her mother didn’t know that Katherine was pregnant and, while she was in Bavaria, she gave birth to a stillborn child.”

Mansfield stayed in Bavaria for another six months and Kimber says elements of the writer’s love affair with Sobieniowski are chronicled in this unpublished poetry. “Some of these poems are directly written for or about him,” said Kimber. “For example, number XXII begins, ‘In the swiftly moving sleigh / We sat curled up under the bear skin rugs / And talked of the dangers of life’, it is almost certain that this sleigh ride depicts Mansfield and Floryan. I do think these remarkable poems are going to offer new biographical detail.”

The business card in the folder also notes the writer’s name as “Katharina Mansfield”, a Slavic-influenced version that Kimber said Mansfield had signed on documents discovered previously, but no such calling card was known to exist.

The newly discovered poems represent a lost collection by Mansfield. The folder’s two letters, dated 8 November 1910 and 15 January 1911, chronicle her failed efforts to persuade publisher Elkin Mathews to print the poems. The second letter is written in a tongue-in-cheek style, pleading with the publisher to put her out of her misery on whether her material will be accepted or not. But the manuscript was never published and, if Mansfield did receive a note of rejection, it has not survived.

Katherine Mansfield’s follow-up letter to Elkin Mathews
Photograph: Courtesy the Newberry Library, Chicago

Handwritten by Mansfield to Elkin Mathews, the second letter reads:

Dear Mr. Mathews
May I hear from you soon the fate of my poor ‘Earth Child’ Poems – I really am worrying about her immediate future – yea or nay.
Love her or hate her, Mr. Mathews, but do not leave her to languish!
Sincerely yours
Katharina Mansfield

“It’s an amusing letter,” said Kimber. “She’s saying, ‘Look, I’ve sent you my manuscript. Are you going to do something with it or are you not? Let me know’, he may have sent her a rejection slip. Authors tend to bin them because they’re too painful to hang on to. She probably binned that, but he held on to the manuscript with these poems.”

The material was later put up for auction and subsequently bequeathed them to the Newberry library in 1999.

Although further research will be carried out, Kimber and the Newberry Library have no doubts the material is authentic. “It took a researcher [Kimber] with considerable knowledge of Mansfield’s published poems,” said Martha Briggs, the Newberry’s Lloyd Lewis curator of modern manuscripts, “and the patience to look carefully at what most people assumed was a manuscript copy”

“Although they’ve been catalogued,” said Kimber, “I don’t think any experienced Mansfield scholar has gone through them and realised what they had in their hands.”

The UK-based scholar thinks that these unpublished poems would have possibly earned Mansfield early recognition as a poetry writer.

Kimber said: “These poems show her early maturity as a poet. They could have been a lovely little book that could have enhanced her reputation and set her off on the road to being a poet, not just a short-story writer. But Elkin Mathews clearly didn’t like them, so they didn’t get published. As well as Mansfield being one of the most famous modernist short-story writers, I believe there is a case to be made for reassessing her as a poet.”

Despite her “hedonistic” behaviour of that period, kimber said “there are some really lovely poems, full of metaphors about children and love”.

“There’s a very touching poem about her beloved grandmother. I would say they are as good as any other poems she would go on to write,” she said.

In 1911, Mansfield went on to loosely fictionalise her adventures in Bavaria with her first published collection of short stories, In a German Pension.

Children’s writer Jacqueline Wilson, most famous for her Tracy Beaker series, is patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society and has loved Mansfield since she read The Doll’s House as a child, being engrossed by the “truth and sharpness” of the story.

“I admire Gerri’s diligent and patient scholarship, and it’s wonderful that she’s discovered a thick folder of Katherine’s unpublished poems. I can’t wait to read them all,” said the former children’s laureate. “The one extract I’ve seen looks fascinating.”

The poems will be available to the public in the Newberry Library and made available online. Next year, the final volume of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield – The Diaries and Miscellany – will publish the new poetry collection in full for the first time.

Mansfield died in 1923 aged 34 following a haemorrhage, in Fontainebleau, France, where she was also buried. Mansfield’s second husband, John Middleton Murry, went on to publish much of her work following her death.

THE GUARDIAN

Katherine Mansfield / Butterfly Laughter

Butterfly Laughter

By Katherine Mansfield
BIOGRAPHY

In the middle of our porridge plates

There was a blue butterfly painted

And each morning we tried who should reach the

butterfly first.

Then the Grandmother said: "Do not eat the poor

butterfly."

That made us laugh.

Always she said it and always it started us laughing.

It seemed such a sweet little joke.

I was certain that one fine morning

The butterfly would fly out of our plates,

Laughing the teeniest laugh in the world,

And perch on the Grandmother's lap. 

Vinícius de Moraes / Sonnet to Katherine Mansfield

Sonnet to Katherine Mansfield
BIOGRAPHY

by Vinícius de Moraes
Translated by Regina Werneck

Vinícius de Moraes / Soneto a Katherine Mansfield (Pessoa)

Your perfume, beloved — in your letters
Reborn, blue...— it's your afflicted hands!
I remember them white, light, withered
Pending along abundant corollas.

I remember them, I go... in lands gone through
I inhale it again, here and there awakened
I stop; and so close I feel you, so close
As if in one we had two lives.

Weeping, so little pain! so much I wished
So much to see you again, so much!... and the spring
Already comes so close!... (will you never part

Spring, from dreams and from prayers!)
And in the imprisoned perfume in your letters
To the spring appears and evanesces.

Katherine Mansfield / To L.H.B.

Illustration by Elena Odriozola

To L.H.B.

By Katherine Mansfield
BIOGRAPHY

Last night for the first time since you were dead
I walked with you, my brother, in a dream.
We were at home again beside the stream
Fringed with tall berry bushes, white and red.
"Don't touch them: they are poisonous," I said.
But your hand hovered, and I saw a beam
Of strange, bright laughter flying round your head
And as you stooped I saw the berries gleam.
"Don't you remember? We called them Dead Man's
Bread!"
I woke and heard the wind moan and the roar
Of the dark water tumbling on the shore.
Where--where is the path of my dream for my eager
feet?
By the remembered stream my brother stands
Waiting for me with berries in his hands...
"These are my body. Sister, take and eat."

Katherine Mansfield / Malade

Two windows
by Triunfo Arciniegas

Malade

By Katherine Mansfield

BIOGRAPHY

Katherine Mansfield / Malade

The man in the room next to mine

has the same complaint as I.

When I wake in the night I hear him turning.

And then he coughs.

And I cough.

And after a silence I cough. And he coughs again.

This goes on for a long time.

Until I feel we are like two roosters

calling to each other at false dawn.

From far-away hidden farms.

Katherine Mansfield / When I was a Bird

When I was a Bird

By Katherine Mansfield
BIOGRAPHY

I climbed up the karaka tree
Into a nest all made of leaves
But soft as feathers.
I made up a song that went on singing all by itself
And hadn't any words, but got sad at the end.
There were daisies in the grass under the tree.
I said just to try them:
"I'll bite off your heads and give them to my little
children to eat."
But they didn't believe I was a bird;
They stayed quite open.
The sky was like a blue nest with white feathers
And the sun was the mother bird keeping it warm.
That's what my song said: though it hadn't any words.
Little Brother came up the patch, wheeling his barrow.
I made my dress into wings and kept very quiet.
Then when he was quite near I said: "Sweet, sweet!"
For a moment he looked quite startled;
Then he said: "Pooh, you're not a bird; I can see
your legs."
But the daisies didn't really matter,
And Little Brother didn't really matter;
I felt just like a bird.

Katherine Mansfield / Why love is blind

WHY LOVE IS BLIND

by Katherine Mansfield
BIOGRAPHY

The Cupid child tired of the winter day
Wept and lamented for the skies of blue
Till, foolish child! He cried his eyes away-
And violets grew.