CHANTED THE POETS
[…] And often as he mounted the stairs to his study with his firm, regular tread he would burst, not into song, for he was entirely unmusical, but into a strange rhythmical chant, for verse of all kinds, both “utter trash,” as he called it, and the most sublime words of Milton and Wordsworth stuck in his memory, and the act of walking or climbing seemed to inspire him to recite whichever it was that came uppermost or suited his mood.
Virginia Woolf, “The Philosopher at Home: Leslie Stephen: A Daughter’s Memories”
The Times, 28 November 1932
Critics often talk about the poetry of Virginia Woolf’s novels — meaning the lyricism of their prose and the symbolism of their imagery. But it’s also remarkable how much she worked lyric poetry into her prose: making it, that is, part of the lives of her characters, in realistic and revealing ways. As someone for whom poetry was part of daily life, she had a keen feeling for how verse is lived as well as read.
This was a thought I began to have as I looked at the front lawn of Talland House, St. Ives, in Cornwall earlier this month. Talland House was where, as a child, Woolf’s family spent their summers until her mother, Julia Stephen, died. And it later provided the setting — transplanted far north to the Hebrides — for To the Lighthouse (1927), which is possibly my favourite novel.
As I stood at the bottom of the driveway to Talland House, I saw two ghostly scenes: one from the first part of the novel (“The Window”), and one from the last (“The Lighthouse”). Both parts describe a single family day at the house, separated by ten years which flutter from the calendar during the lyrical middle section, “Time Passes”, during which the First World War occurs and the mother of the family, Mrs. Ramsay, dies.
In the first scene, Mr. Ramsay — who is based on Woolf’s father, the philosopher and literary critic Leslie Stephen — barks out a line of poetry while walking in the garden, alarming other characters. In the second scene, Lily Briscoe, a painter, and Augustus Carmichael, a poet, watch from the lawn as Mr. Ramsay and his children finally make their journey to the Lighthouse.
Such moments, Woolf told her diary on 14 May 1925, would be at the heart of the new book that she wanted to write:
The centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel…
In both this sketch, and in her 1932 reminiscence of Leslie Stephen for The Times (see above), it is his tendency to spontaneously “burst” into poetry that comes to mind as one of his most characteristic habits. In To the Lighthouse, she fleshes out what this was like for those around him: loveable and embarrassing.
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