A Little Boy's Dream (Katherine Mansfield)

 About the Author: Katherine Mansfield (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a New Zealand writer and critic. She is considered to be an important author of the modernist movement. Her works are celebrated across the world, and have been published in 25 languages. Mansfield wrote short stories and poetry under a variation of her own name, Katherine Mansfield, which explored anxiety, sexuality and existentialism. New Zealandian identity is the predominant tone in her works. When she was 19, she left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Mansfield's in the poem, "A Little Boy's Dream" portrays the meaning of life through the dream of a little boy.

Analysis of the Poem: 

Dream: Life is filled with dreams. Kids always remain happy in their lives because they keep on dreaming constantly. “A Little Boy’s Dream” depicts the dream of a little boy who is sailing all alone on a boat. Katherine Mansfield by using the child as the subject managed to connote a deeper hidden meaning. By way of depicting the dream of a little boy, the poet is actually telling the biggest reality of life. All of us have to walk all alone in our life’s journey. Here leading our life is referred to journey. In our life, we are surrounded by the people we love and the people who love us but still when we are born and when we die, we are alone.

Journey: The poet by the means of a dream visualization of the boy, explains the biggest truth of life. The little boy says “Sea and sky, sea and sky, quietly on the deck I lie, having just a little rest”. Here the poet means that only the sea and sky are walking with him which are actually non-living things. She also means that human life is mortal and Nature is immortal. Living things in the sea, like fish for instance, also make a distance from the little boy. This is also a truth of real life. Only the nature walks with us when we are alone, all the living beings stay away. Nature is as a matter of fact, a man’s best friend. The little kid in his dream is sailing to a far-away unknown lands, in a similar manner we lead our life to the unknown destiny and during the course of life we learn the reality one by one without knowing the future of us. Of course, we are completely unaware of the circumstances which we have to face in the future but still we keep on moving.

Duty: The little boy understands the truth of life in his dream itself. He also says “I have really done my best, In an awful pirate fight, but we captured them all right.” Here the poet means to say that in our journey called life, we give the best we can, as a result of which the outcomes occur. If we do not work for making our lives better, we will stay the way we are.

Love: The poet also explains the significance of a mother’s love in the poem. The child wakes up from his dream and is scared to have witnessed loneliness. Seeing the child’s embarrassment, his mother comes and embraces him. When the mother embraces her the fear of the child is gone.  Now the child feels that he is safe and secured in the embrace of his mother. Thus, the poet epitomizes mother’s love which is selfless than the love that one experience from kith and kin around him.

Conclusion: The poet makes the child acquainted with the realities of life through a dream. Like the child, the individuals also in some way or the other, sooner or later get acquainted with what life is really all about.