[Vwoolf] Poetry about Virginia Woolf

Stuart N. Clarke stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com
Wed Mar 12 08:43:41 EDT 2014


It is a truth universally acknowledged that no serious poem about Virginia Woolf fails to mention her suicide: see (1).  However, I can’t decide whether I don’t prefer (2) to (1) as *poetry*.

Stuart
_______________________________________

(1)
After reading ‘The Waves’

We will never be

afraid of Virginia Woolf with those 

huge light wells of eyes, that face 

as dreamily long as a lonely 

holiday. How on earth so far from 

heaven could she have imagined 

such monologues of naked poetry? 

To sustain a page’s almost perfect 

symmetry of sight and sound must 

have cost her many hours’ unease. 

Those taut threads of vocal being 

must have snapped loose from her 

spinning mind and the bobbin of 

her insight spun dizzily—but where 

could we find a knot in that 

weaving? What pulled all the 

threads loose a decade later

and walked her into the river’s arms 

until it clasped its hands over her 

singing head, drowning even her lake-

wide eyes in a waterfall of words?

BRUCE BEAVER 

(“Sydney Morning Herald”, 29 June 1974, p. 15)

(2)
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Seriously.
This is it.
We are changing.
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