Today’s Poem: Voices of the Air

Katherine Mansfield’s poetic awareness

Martha Berkeley, Tree Fly, 1837 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Voices of the Air

by Katherine Mansfield

But then there comes that moment rare
When, for no cause that I can find,
The little voices of the air
Sound above all the sea and wind.

The sea and wind do then obey
And sighing, sighing double notes
Of double basses, content to play
A droning chord for the little throats —

The little throats that sing and rise
Up into the light with lovely ease
And a kind of magical, sweet surprise
To hear and know themselves for these —

For these little voices: the bee, the fly,
The leaf that taps, the pod that breaks,
The breeze on the grass-tops bending by,
The shrill quick sound that the insect makes.

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The New-Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) experienced her greatest surge of literary output as her early death from tuberculosis closed in upon her. Though her fiction had begun appearing in print as early as 1910, the final years of her life saw the publication of such major stories as “The Garden Party.” Her poems, including today’s selection, “Voices of the Air,” were published posthumously in a single 1923 volume, simply called Poems. 

Mansfield takes her place with other writers of her era whose primary, reputation-making gift was for prose fiction, but who were also able poets: Willa Cather, for example, whose “Fides, Spes” appeared here on April 18, and Edith Wharton. A writer of popular “sketches” at the start of her career, she could readily transfer her quick, sharp observations and compressed emotional complexity into verse, as her poem “Countrywomen,” ironic but sounding a note of sympathy, makes clear. The same sympathetic wryness occurs in “A Few Lessons for Beginners,” a humorous poem mocking instructions for new mothers that ends, nevertheless, on the true and consoling assertion that there’s really only one thing that mothers have to do right. 

Katherine Mansfield (Wikimedia Commons)

In Today’s Poem,  Mansfield demonstrates her additional bent for interior lyricism, significant in the texture of her fiction. This poem, “Voices of the Air,” in tetrameter abab quatrains, invokes the experience of hearing what has been going on, unheard, until for some reason the human ear awakens to it. Small insect songs sound against the droning chords of the sea. All the sounds are random and not necessarily beautiful, yet the speaker’s consciousness intuitively arranges them, foregrounding the insects, making the sea and wind a chorus to provide supporting harmony. 

“Voices of the Air” is a nature poem, but — and again, Mansfield the fiction writer is never far from Mansfield the poet — its focus is really a trick of the mind, to perceive order and beauty even when there is none. That perception expands through the course of the poem, from the sea and the insects to “the leaf that taps, the pod that breaks, / The breeze on the grass-tops bending by,” all part of the poem’s great subject, the human capacity for awareness.

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