Covering Wings

Love! Love! Your tenderness
Your beautiful, watchful way
Grasp me, fold me, cover me
I lie in a kind of daze
Neither asleep nor yet awake
Neither a bud nor flower
Brings to-morro
Joy or sorrow
The black or the golden hour

Love! Love! You pity me so
Chide me, scold me--cry
"Submit--submit! You must not fight!
What may I do, then? Die
But, oh my horror of quiet beds
How can I longer stay
"One to be ready
Two to be steady
Three to be off and away!

Darling heart--your gravity
Your sorrowful, mournful gaze-
"Two bleached roads lie under the moon
At the parting of the ways.
But the tiny, tree-thatched, narrow lane
Isn't it yours and mine
The blue-bells rin
Hey, ding-a-ding, ding
And buds are thick on the vine
Love! Love! Grief of my heart
As a tree droops over a strea
You hush me, lull me, dark me
The shadow hiding the gleam
Your drooping and tragical boughs of grac
Are heavy as though with rain
Run! Run
Into the sun
Let us be children again

Background and Analysis of This Poem

Katherine Mansfield's Covering Wings appears in her collected Poems, first published in 1923, the year Mansfield died. The poem is also listed among her poetic works by the Katherine Mansfield Society, alongside other brief lyrics that reveal a more intimate, song-like side of a writer best known for short fiction. Unlike the finely observed social worlds of stories such as The Garden Party, this poem turns inward. It gives us a speaker calling out to Love itself, asking not for excitement, conquest or certainty, but for tenderness and shelter.

The poem begins with repetition: "Love! Love!" That opening has the force of an invocation, almost a prayer. The speaker addresses Love as a presence capable of watching, grasping, folding and covering. These verbs are physical and protective. They suggest wings, arms, blankets, perhaps even the sheltering gesture of a bird over its young. Mansfield does not describe a lover in ordinary detail; she turns love into an enveloping force. The emotional need is simple but deep: to be held safely while the self is not quite ready for the world.

That in-between state is one of the poem's most important features. The speaker lies "in a kind of daze", neither asleep nor fully awake, "neither a bud nor flower". This is a beautiful image of suspended becoming. A bud has not yet opened, while a flower has declared itself to the air. The speaker is somewhere between those conditions, not fully closed, not fully revealed. Mansfield captures the vulnerability of being unfinished. It may be youth, emotional uncertainty, illness, desire, or the tremulous beginning of some new phase of life. The poem's delicacy comes from the fact that it does not force the moment to identify itself.

The question of tomorrow gives the poem its quiet tension. Will it bring "Joy or sorrow", "the black or the golden hour"? The paired opposites are simple, almost nursery-like, but they are not childish. They show how the future can feel when one is emotionally exposed: everything seems possible, and possibility itself becomes frightening. Love is asked to cover the speaker not because life is already terrible, but because life has not yet declared what it will be. The poem trembles before uncertainty.

Mansfield's own writing often dwells on fragile thresholds: between health and illness, belonging and exile, childhood and adult consciousness, intimacy and solitude. The New Zealand History entry on Mansfield notes her significance as a New Zealand-born modernist writer whose life and career unfolded across several countries, while her work frequently attends to fleeting moments of perception. Covering Wings shares that quality of transience. It does not narrate a whole life or even a complete event. It catches one breath before the next day arrives.

For modern readers, Covering Wings may feel slight at first, but its slightness is part of its design. It is a poem of softness, hesitation and need. Mansfield gives language to a mood many people know but rarely name: the desire to be protected while one is still becoming, before joy or sorrow has announced itself. The poem leaves the speaker beneath Love's imagined wings, not rescued from uncertainty, but briefly covered from its coldest air.