A Day In Bed

I wish I had not got a cold,
The wind is big and wild,
I wish that I was very old,
Not just a little child.

Somehow the day is very long
Just keeping here, alone;
I do not like the big wind's song,
He's growling for a bone.

He's like an awful dog we had
Who used to creep around
And snatch at things--he was so bad,
With just that horrid sound.

I'm sitting up and nurse has made
Me wear a woolly shawl;
I wish I was not so afraid;
It's horrid to be small.

It really feels quite like a day
Since I have had my tea;
P'raps everybody's gone away
And just forgotten me.

And oh! I cannot go to sleep
Although I am in bed.
The wind keeps going creepy-creep
And waiting to be fed.

Background and Analysis of This Poem

Katherine Mansfield's A Day In Bed is a brief, child-voiced poem about illness, boredom and the peculiar drama of being left alone too long with one's thoughts. It was published in The Lone Hand in Sydney in 1909, with one stanza omitted, according to an article on Mansfield's early writing and publication history in Humanities. That early publication context is useful, because the poem shows Mansfield practising one of the talents that would later define her fiction: the ability to enter a small domestic moment and reveal the private emotional weather inside it.

The speaker is a child kept in bed with a cold, wrapped in a woolly shawl by the nurse and forced into stillness while the day stretches on. Mansfield catches the child's frustration beautifully. Time does not merely pass slowly; it feels almost broken. "It really feels quite like a day / Since I have had my tea" is funny because the scale is so recognisably childish, but it is also emotionally exact. When a child is unwell, confined and dependent on adults, even a short interval can feel enormous. The bedroom becomes a little kingdom of waiting.

The poem's strongest feeling is not physical discomfort, but loneliness. The child wonders whether everybody has gone away and forgotten them. This fear may be unreasonable, yet Mansfield treats it with sympathy rather than correction. Children often experience absence with startling intensity, and the poem understands that being small means having limited power over information, movement and reassurance. The adults may be nearby, but from the bed the world feels unreachable. The child is not only ill; they are cut off from the household's ordinary life.

The wind gives the poem its touch of unease. It goes "creepy-creep" and seems to be "waiting to be fed", a wonderfully odd image that turns weather into a half-living creature. Mansfield allows the child's imagination to animate the room and the world outside it. The wind is not simply wind anymore. It has appetite, patience and a faintly sinister presence. This is where the poem becomes more than a cute piece about childhood sickness. It shows how fear grows in stillness, particularly when a child is tired, bored and unable to test their imaginings against the wider world.

Although Mansfield is best remembered for short stories such as The Garden Party and Prelude, her poetry often shares the same interest in fleeting impressions and delicate shifts of feeling. The Katherine Mansfield Society lists resources for her poems, and these shorter works help round out our sense of her as a writer attentive to voice, rhythm and mood. In A Day In Bed, she keeps the diction simple enough to suit the child speaker, but the emotional pattern is carefully observed. Boredom becomes fear, fear becomes fantasy, and the ordinary bedroom becomes unfamiliar.

For modern readers, A Day In Bed remains appealing because it honours a child's perspective without patronising it. The poem does not turn childhood into pure innocence or cheerful mischief. It remembers that childhood can also be powerless, fretful and deeply imaginative. Mansfield's little invalid is not in great danger, yet the feelings are real: the long wait for company, the wish to be older, the cold, the shawl, the wind, the suspicion of being forgotten. In a few light stanzas, the poem captures how large the world can feel from the small island of a sickbed.