Re-verse

INTRODUCED BY CHRIS TSE SANARY

Her little hot room looked over the bay Through a stiff palisade of glinting palms, And there she would lie in the heat of the day, Her dark head resting upon her arms, So quiet, so still, she did not seem To think, to feel, or even to dream.

The shimmering, blinding web of sea Hung from the sky and the spider sun

With busy frightening cruelty Crawled over the sky and spun and spun, She could see it still when she shut her eyes, And the little boats caught in the web like flies.

Down below at this idle hour

About the author: Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) is widely considered to be one of the most influential and important authors of the modernist movement. Born and raised in Thorndon, her fiction, poetry and essays have been translated into more than 25 languages. Although renowned for her astute and finely crafted short stories, Mansfield was also a prolific poet. Her earliest forays into the form can be traced back to as early as 1903 when she was teenager. Much of her output in verse was compiled and published posthumously.

In brief: This poem takes place in Sanary-sur-mer, a village on the Côte d’Azur in the southeast of France. It’s close to Bandol, which was dear to Mansfield and where she returned to convalesce after her health deteriorated. Mansfield uses a combination of direct language and imagery to describe the mental state of the poem’s speaker, which may have been similar to what she felt in the later years of her life as she tried to balance writing with managing her ill health. Despite its opening with the bright, blissful image of a window overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, a dark undercurrent scores the poem. Here, stillness doesn’t necessarily equate to calm or peace – instead, it stands in for something ominous and apocalyptic (“Nobody walked in the dusty street”).