Katherine Mansfield, the New Zealand-born writer whose short stories helped shape modernist fiction, wrote “Covering Wings” in the shadow of the tuberculosis that often kept her bedridden and longing for sun. Although her poetry is less famous than her prose, it returns to the same tensions between illness and vitality, intimacy and independence. Written in the early twentieth century, this poem reads like an argument with love itself — a force that is tender, watchful, and yet suffocating.
The speaker opens by calling out to love, and the opening lines themselves seem to wrap around her. The verbs “grasp me, fold me, cover me” mimic both an embrace and a trap, while the lulling near rhymes of “tenderness,” “ways,” and “daze” create a drowsy, suspended mood. She lies “neither asleep nor yet awake, / Neither a bud nor flower,” caught in a state of waiting. The poem’s rhythm then breaks into shorter, uncertain lines — “Brings to-morrow / Joy or sorrow” — as if the speaker can no longer sustain the lullaby. Love’s protection has become a hovering presence whose outcome is unclear.
The second stanza turns openly desperate. Love pities her, scolds her, and commands her to “Submit—submit! You must not fight!” Her response is stark: “What may I do, then? Die?” Here the poem connects enforced passivity with death, and the “horror of quiet beds” becomes more than a dislike of rest. It is a fear of being erased by care, of losing movement and will. The sudden playground chant — “One to be ready, / Two to be steady, / Three to be off and away!” — cuts through the adult voice with a child’s impulse to run. Its bouncing rhythm is the opposite of submission.
Mansfield then offers two landscapes. In the third stanza, “two bleached roads lie under the moon, / At the parting of the ways,” pale and drained of color. Against that ghostly choice, the speaker proposes a smaller path: “the tiny, tree-thatched, narrow lane” where bluebells ring and “buds are thick on the vine.” The narrow lane may not be grand, but it is alive, intimate, and shared. The jingling “Hey, ding-a-ding, ding!” is another burst of childlike sound, pushing back against the mournful adult gaze.
The final stanza gathers all the poem’s images into a closing conflict. Love is now “a tree droops over a stream,” hushing, lulling, darkening. Its “drooping and tragical boughs of grace” are lovely but heavy, “as though with rain,” and they hide the gleam. The speaker cannot remain beneath them. Her final lines are not a resolution but a plea: “Run! Run! / Into the sun! / Let us be children again.” That longing for sunlight and childlike freedom is the poem’s central pulse. Mansfield does not simply reject tenderness; she asks love to stop hovering and instead join her in the open air.
The significance of “Covering Wings” lies in this honest ambivalence. It understands that even well-intentioned love can feel like a cage, and that care can blur into control. By mixing lullaby rhythms with sudden chants and shifting between shadow and sun, the poem makes the reader feel the tug between safety and freedom. For readers, it is a vivid reminder that loving someone sometimes means knowing when to let them run.