[Vwoolf] VSW quote query

[Stuart N. Clarke]

This person has written to me about the poem on pp. 205-6 of the Hogarth Press edn of “All Passion Spent”.  Either VSW made it up or it’s something obscure where she has updated the spelling.  I’ve done a bit of hunting without success. 

Stuart


I am a PhD student in English at the University of Colorado-Boulder and I am trying to solve a literary mystery. Last year I gave a presentation on allusions in Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent, and was able to identify every text quoted or alluded to within the novel ex[c]e[p]t for a poem that the protagonist reads, from a book "from 1493" (reproduced below). My googling, database search, and consultation with a few professors at my university and abroad, however, have revealed no information on what this poem's source may be, or whether it even predates the novel! In fact, if you search any line from the poem on Google, the only search result is the novel itself. I have already been in contact with archive librarians at Yale, where the manuscript of All Passion Spent is held, and they could find no annotation or note within the manuscript that gives any hint as to its origin or authorship. I thought that since you were connected to the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain that you might be able to provide me with some insight. Thanks so much for your time. 

Best, 

Melodie Roschman 

“Cease of your oaths, cease of your great swearing

Cease of your pomp, cease of your vainglory,

Cease of your hate, cease of your blaspheming, 

Cease of your malice, cease of your envy, 

Cease of your wrath, cease of your lechery, 

Cease of your fraud, cease your deception, 

Cease of your tongues making detraction.”




Flee faint falsehood, fickle, foul, and fell, 

Flee fatal flatterers, full of fairness, 

Flee fair feigning, fables of favell,

Flee folks’ fellowship, frequenting falseness,

Flee frantic facers fulfilled of frowardness,

Flee fools’ fallacies, flee fond fantasies, 

Flee from fresh babblers, feigning flatteries.
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