Camomile Tea

Outside the sky is light with stars;
There's a hollow roaring from the sea.
And, alas! for the little almond flowers,
The wind is shaking the almond tree.

How little I thought, a year ago,
In the horrible cottage upon the Lee
That he and I should be sitting so
And sipping a cup of camomile tea.

Light as feathers the witches fly,
The horn of the moon is plain to see;
By a firefly under a jonquil flower
A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.

We might be fifty, we might be five,
So snug, so compact, so wise are we!
Under the kitchen-table leg
My knee is pressing against his knee.

Our shutters are shut, the fire is low,
The tap is dripping peacefully;
The saucepan shadows on the wall
Are black and round and plain to see.

Background and Analysis of This Poem

Katherine Mansfield's Camomile Tea is a brief poem of domestic stillness, memory and quiet enchantment. It appears among her collected poems and is listed by the Katherine Mansfield Society as part of her poetic work. Mansfield is best remembered as a modernist short story writer, but her poems often share the same gift for atmosphere found in her fiction: the ability to make a small moment feel charged with private meaning. Here, the central action is modest enough: two people sit together, sipping camomile tea. Yet around that cup gathers weather, memory, intimacy and fantasy.

The poem begins outside, where the sky is bright with stars, the sea roars hollowly, and the wind shakes the almond tree. This opening matters because it sets the domestic scene against a restless natural world. The little almond flowers are vulnerable in the wind, and there is a faint note of pity in the speaker's "alas!" The world beyond the room is beautiful, but it is not entirely gentle. Mansfield lets us feel the tremor of exposure before turning inward to the comfort of shared tea.

The second stanza gives the poem its emotional centre. The speaker remembers a time only a year earlier, in a "horrible cottage upon the Lee", and marvels that she and her companion should now be sitting together in this calmer scene. The contrast is delicate but telling. Mansfield does not explain the earlier unhappiness, which is wise. The phrase is enough. It lets the reader sense a past discomfort, poverty, loneliness, illness or emotional strain without pinning it to one tidy cause. The present cup of camomile tea gains its tenderness because it is not taken for granted.

Camomile itself is a wonderfully apt centre for the poem. It suggests calm, sleep, domestic care and old-fashioned remedy. The tea is not grand or glamorous, but that is precisely the point. It is the kind of comfort that might go unnoticed unless one has known a period when comfort was scarce. Mansfield often finds emotional truth in such ordinary objects. A cup, a flower, a room, a gust of wind: these are not decorations, but small vessels of feeling.

The final stanza shifts into fairy-tale imagery, with witches, the horn of the moon, a firefly, a jonquil flower and a goblin toasting a bumble-bee. The change is playful, but it does not feel random. The quiet domestic moment seems to open the speaker's imagination into a miniature nocturnal world. The moon and stars have not disappeared; they have become part of a charming, slightly mischievous fantasy. This is Mansfield's lightness at work. She allows a moment of peace to become enchanted without making it sugary. The goblin's toast is tiny, comic and strangely perfect.

For modern readers, Camomile Tea is a reminder that happiness often arrives in modest forms. The poem does not announce a dramatic salvation. It simply notices that, after whatever came before, two people are now together, warm, and able to sit quietly with tea while the night moves around them. The charm of the poem lies in that balance between fragility and contentment. Outside, the wind shakes the almond tree; inside, the cup is held, the memory is softened, and imagination begins to glow like a firefly under a flower.