Voices of the Air
Voices of the Air
Original Text
Katherine Mansfield, Poems (London: Constable, 1923): 45. 11647.e.58 British Library
2When, for no cause that I can find,
3The little voices of the air
4Sound above all the sea and wind.
5The sea and wind do then obey
6And sighing, sighing double notes
7Of double basses, content to play
8A droning chord for the little throats --
9The little throats that sing and rise
10Up into the light with lovely ease
11And a kind of magical, sweet surprise
12To hear and know themselves for these --
13For these little voices: the bee, the fly,
14The leaf that taps, the pod that breaks,
15The breeze on the grass-tops bending by,
16The shrill quick sound that the insect makes.
Notes
1] "Katherine Mansfield's practice was suddenly to spend several days in writing poetry, and then to abandon poetry wholly for months and years together. `Poems at the Villa Pauline' ... were written in curious circumstances. 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" (p. xii; presumably by Middleton Murry). Back to Line
Publication Start Year
1923
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
RPO 2000.
Rhyme