Her more mature novels – Mrs Dalloway (MD) … To The Lighthouse … The Waves

To my knowledge Virginia Woolf¹ never wrote any poetry. However, I really enjoy  her words from her books … you could say there are sparks of the poetic as well as being profound, philosophic … consider Mrs Dalloway (MD) for example …

… from metonymy (an attribute stands for the thing itself) to metaphor … a multi-layered metaphoric stream of consciousness with a certain poetic lyrical flow … VW used a new approach in writing

… all about sensitive people living from one privileged moment to the next, passing through intervening periods of depression and doubt

And then thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

                          What a lark! What a plunge!

 For so it had always seen to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning, like the flap of the wave, the kiss of the wave … (page 3 MD)

Lark and plunge … Life and death … to build up or to close in … these are the two contending forces in MD … Clarissa is touched by both as she moves through her activities in arranging a party on a glorious June day … her parallel opposite is the shell-shocked Septimus Smith who disturbs her joie de vie.

Individuality and universality in irreconcilable opposition … each person seeks to be connected to the whole from which that person is alienated by individual existence.

… different people in different places at the same time … layered together in an underlying communion … reflected in the individual’s actions in ways unknown … exploring the extent and influence of such impressions made on the individual consciousness …

… did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her (page 9 MD)

 … somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, of the trees at home, … part of the people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best (pages 9-10 MD)

 … nothing exists outside us except a state of mind  … (page 62 MD)

 … the narrator is a consciousness born by the consciousness created from the characters in the novel … yet somehow apart … seeing all, knowing all perspectives … in the present as the present unfolds … including in the present the past remembered by the characters … the virtual present of the readers’ experience

… unity, reconciliation, communion well up spontaneously from within the characterisation

… the narrator is unknown but sensed by the characters … does the narrator have life outside the life of the characters and if this is the case then what is the nature of such individuality? … the vital questions.

VW’s ‘great discovery’ ² … ‘tunnelling process’ … to dig our beautiful caves behind her characters … humanity, humour, depth … the caves connect

VW philosophy … miraculous joy of the moment rises out of the commonplace, not from some transcendental source …

How moments like these are buds on the tree of life (MD page 31)

Foolishly, she had set them opposite each other. That could be remedied tomorrow. If it were fine, they should go for a picnic. Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. Just now (but this cannot last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment while they were all talking about boots) just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floating in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there, from husband and children and friends; all of this rising in this profound stillness (she was helping William Bankes to one very small piece more and peered into the depths of the earthenware pot) seemed now for no special reason to stay there like smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe together. Nothing need be said, nothing could be said. There it was all around them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr Bankes to an especially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains forever after. This would remain.

(from ‘To The Lighthouse’ … pages 113-114)

 Footnotes …

¹Virginia Woolf 1882 – 1941 …  father Sir Leslie Stephen …educated by her father’s magnificent library … member of ‘The Bloomsbury Group’ … lived in the cultured world of the London intelligentsia… bisexual … relationship with  Vita Sackville-West … worked with husband Leonard to found the Hogarth Press … depressive – suicided

Reference –

²Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse … contemporary critical essays … Edited by Su Read.  (New Casebooks – Macmillan)