INTRODUCTORY NOTE
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. 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; and of these few hardly one, except those which have appeared after her death in The Adelphi, over her own name. All those which were published in her lifetime, with two exceptions, appeared in papers which we edited together—in Rhythm, when we were young; in The Athenaeum, when we were older. The reason of this restriction was that she had tried in vain to get them published in other places. I remember her telling me when first
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