Katherine Mansfield Quotes

It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from God.

She turned to the sunlight And shook her yellow head, And whispered to her neighbor: "Winter is dead.

Spring time is the land awakening.

Again the blackbirds sings; the streams Wake, laughing, from their winter dreams, And tremble in the April showers The tassels of the maple flowers.

Almond blossom, sent to teach us That the spring days soon will reach us.

Come up, April, though the valley, / In your robes of beauty drest, / Come and wake your flowery children / From their wintry beds of rest.

I think March and fall are natural seasons for me to feel invigorated.

With rushing winds and gloomy skies The dark and stubborn Winter dies: Far-off, unseen, Spring faintly cries, Bidding her earliest child arise; March!

The snow has at last melted, the fields regain their herbage, and the trees their leaves.

In April the sweet showers fall And pierce the drought of March to the root, and all The veins are bathed in liquor of such power As brings about the engendering of the flower.

April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life.

Blow trumpet, for the world is white with May.

What potent blood hath modest May.

Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows' wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees.

The streams, rejoiced that winter's work is done, Talk of to-morrow's cowslips as they run.

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.

The children with the streamlets sing, When April stops at last her weeping; And every happy growing thing Laughs like a babe just roused from sleeping.

For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants . . .

The morning woods were utterly new. A strong yellow light pooled beneath the trees; my shadow appeared and vanished on the path, since a third of the trees I walked under were still bare, a third spread a luminous haze wherever they grew, and another third blocked the sun with new, whole leaves. The snakes were out - I saw a bright, smashed one on the path - and the butterflies were vaulting and furling about; the phlox was at its peak, and even the evergreens looked greener, newly created and washed.