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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2023
On the death of Katherine Mansfield
Last night I dreamed I did a valley seek And heard a cuckoo in blood-red lilies cry;
Last night I dreamed I climbed an Alpine peak And saw a teardrop falling from the sky.
A graveyard tombstone on Rome’s western bound Marks Shelley’s death a hundred years ago;
A hundred years on, Hell’s grim wheels resound Over the green forest of Fontainebleau.
They say the world is a ruthless instrument, Yet our ideals, like beacons, guide our tread;
If beauty, truth, virtue are fortune’s friend Why do five rainbows not gleam overhead?
Was it just once or for infinity, Those twenty immortal minutes spent with you?
Who can believe that your divinity Has faded from the earth like morning dew?
No! Life is but material delusion; The beauteous soul rests in the love of God;
A thirty-year sojourn, a mere illusion; I weep, but see you smile in heaven’s abode.
In London, Mansfield, we’d a summer date To meet on Lake Geneva, as you recall,
Where Mont Blanc’s snows refract upon the lake; Now stare I at the clouds and sad tears fall.
When I was young, my life embraced new things; I sensed as in a dream the worth of love;
Mature love comes from life’s awakenings; Now to death’s brink my love and life I move.
True love is crystal that will never shatter; Love is the road to completeness of being:
Death is a cauldron of material matter, The gods’ condensed conflux of everything.
Would my thoughts flew like electricity And I could touch your distant soul in heaven!
I shed my tears on the wind: ‘When, when,’ I cry, ‘Can the dread gate ’twixt life and death be riven?’
â XU ZHIMO
[Translation by Stuart Lyons, 2021]
[Written on 11 March 1923, first published in Effort Weekly (Shanghai), 44 (18 March 1923), and reprinted in Complete Works, 1, pp. 398–9. English verse translation by Stuart Lyons, 2021.]
Xu Zhimo was an emerging Chinese poet who had just gone down from a year’s study at King’s College, Cambridge, when he met Katherine Mansfield.
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