Three Children's Songs of Katherine Mansfield

About

These three settings were written for a centennial concert of songs setting the poetry of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923). Mansfield wrote short stories, poetry, letters, journals and reviews, and is regarded as a central figure in British modernism.Three story collections were published while she was alive and two posthumously. She spent much of her life in England and Europe, eventually succumbing to tuberculosis. These children’s poems, from the 1907 collection “Children’s Book of Verse”, are early examples of her writing and not as widely known as her later poetry and short stories.They have a charm all of their own, while following the conventions of similar writers of the period such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Hans Christian Andersen, andWalter de la Mare. The three poems set here all have a bittersweet tinge - from the child suffering illness, to the lonely child desperately wanting playmates, and the child confined to bed with a cold wondering if she’s been abandoned.