A Strange Rhythmical Chant: Part II

How Virginia Woolf used poetry to say the unspoken

For how… could one say what one meant and observe the rules of poetry?

Virginia Woolf, “A Letter to a Young Poet” (1932)

In the first part of this essay, I wrote about how Virginia Woolf based the character of Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927) on her father, Leslie Stephen, and his habit of chanting verse out loud. This week, I want to consider how verse is used in the novel to illuminate the very different character of Mrs. Ramsay, whose response to poetry expresses some of Woolf’s own feelings about it.

When Mr. Ramsay yells “Someone had blundered” — from Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) — in the garden of his family’s holiday house, it echoes like a shot being fired. And, in a way, it is a shot, in the silent war between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. The first words of the novel are:

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine to-morrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.

This is said to her small child, James, who has just asked if they can visit the lighthouse across the bay. Mr. Ramsay, though, disagrees:

“But,” said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, “it won’t be fine.”

Their disagreement — about the weather, but really about parenting — runs through the whole first part of the book, which Woolf set on a single summer’s day.

Mr. Ramsay then retreats from the scene, the argument unresolved, and soon Mrs. Ramsay hears him chanting poetry to himself. Her husband is stalking the garden, scaring his house-guests, as he imagines himself “Stormed at by shot and shell” in Tennyson’s galloping lines about the massacre of British soldiers at the Battle of Balaclava. His identification with the poem is indicated by his misquotation of the next line:

Boldly they rode and well

becomes

Boldly we rode and well

from Tennyson’s first draft of “The Charge of the Light Brigade”

But then he jumps backwards through the poem to a more ominous earlier line:

Someone had blundered

It is this that gets stuck in Mr. Ramsay’s head — and his insistent repetition of it eventually becomes part of his wife’s thoughts too. Chapter 6 begins:

But what had happened?

Someone had blundered.

Starting from her musing she gave meaning to words which she had held meaningless in her mind for a long stretch of time. “Someone had blundered ” — Fixing her short-sighted eyes upon her husband, who was now bearing down upon her, she gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to her (the jingle mated itself in her head) that something had happened, someone had blundered. But she could not for the life of her think what.

What has happened is that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay have disagreed; Mr. Ramsay has gone off in a petulant huff about it; and now he is returning to the scene of the argument. His fixation on the “blundered” line at first seems to be a passive-aggressive way to accuse his wife of being at fault. But in fact he is beginning to apply it to himself.