The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I
Friday — March 8, 1918
March 8, 1918
My last day of Three in Hell and Hell in Three.
In bed. Breakfast over. The window open, the airs waving through and a great beam of sun shining on a page 147 double stock…. But I'm blind till to-morrow. The G.'s go by a train at 8 o'clock to-night and to-morrow I'll be myself again.
I feel horribly weak and frail and exhausted, I must confess, and if they stayed a day longer, should take to my bed. But once the great pressure is gone, I will perk up, as you know, ever so quick again. But don't ever worry about not replying to the G. and don't feel under the least obligation to her. She's so blown that not even the ox could brake her belly—and she's a damned underbred female. All that she has done or was to have done for me is the purest conceit on her part, because I am English and you write pour le Times and we have been innocent enough to flatter her vanity. She said yesterday: “Mais, qu'est-ce que c'est, mon amie! Même quand vous n'êtes pas très bien portante, c'est seulement avec vous que j'ai le sens de la vie!” And I thought of L. M.'s “Even if you are nervy, Katie, it is only when I am with you that I feel full of life.” And H. L.'s “So strange—the divine sense of inflation that I have when I come near you.” Oh, if you are a little warrior in times of peace, do keep me from harpies and ghouls!!!
I write those three remarks out of horror, you understand, because they do terrify me….
The lines of the poem I quoted were, alas! not mine. They were writ by Thomas Randolph (1605-1635) and were part of an ode to Master Anthony Stafford to hasten him into the country.
Come, spur away.
I have no patience for a longer stay,
But must go down
And leave the changeable noise of this great town:
I will the country see….
And the verse ends with this line:
page 148Tis time that we grow wise, when all the world grows mad.
It's altogether a most delightful poem. I wish I knew what else he had written. There's another line charms me:
If I a poem leave, that poem is my son.
I feel he is a man we both should have known—that he is, most decidedly, one of the Heron Men.
And did Sir Thomas Wyatt write a great many poems? He seems to me extraordinarily good! Do you know a poem of his: Vixi puellis nuper idoneus? My strike! It's a rare good'un.