Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

32 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
sense of the race of time ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,’” in a straight quotation
from “To his Coy Mistress” (D1 304). Her 1921 diary entry is therefore a statement of
new intent; and it may not be fanciful to detect a certain emphasis in its verbs: “I mean to
read Marvell.” Undoubtedly the tercentenary celebrations had something to do with this
new interest and resolve. But at the same time, Woolf can hardly have been insensitive to
how “To his Coy Mistress” valorises male at the expense of female anxiety, or to the poem’s
vaunted sexual egalitarianism, refl ected in the plural pronouns of the last strophe with its
urgent project of coupling. She would have been similarly aware of how “Th e Garden,”
another celebrated lyric, explicitly connects male pastoral ease and mentation with the
absence of women. And she was certainly conscious of Eliot’s emergent authority both as
literary critic and canon-shaper. We should not be surprised to fi nd, then, that there is a
critical and political edge to this renewed desire to “read Marvell.”
Marvellian lyric is in fact a strong presence in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), in To the Lighthouse
(1927), and in Th e Waves (1931), besides in those novels already mentioned. What
is more, Woolf’s pleasured but sceptical handling of this body of verse diff ers from the
kind of gushing appreciation Vita Sackville-West off ered in her 1929 monograph, Andrew
Marvell, which was the fi rst volume of the series “Th e Poets on the Poets.” But for the
purposes of this essay, attention will be confi ned to four important moments in To the
Lighthouse. Th ese are: Mr. Ramsay’s notorious demand for his exhausted wife’s sympathy;
Mrs. Ramsay’s hosting of her dinner party; Lily’s failure of sympathy in the garden with
Mr. Ramsay ten years after; and part of the long postponed boat trip to the lighthouse.
Before considering what Woolf does in the fi rst of those passages, we might refresh our
memories of the relevant lines from Marvell:
Here at the Fountains sliding foot,
Or at some Fruit-trees mossy root,
Casting the Bodies Vest aside,
My Soul into the boughs does glide:
Th ere like a Bird it sits, and sings
“Th e Garden” VII (Marvell 49)
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our Time devour
“To his Coy Mistress” 37-39 (27)
Th e salient words from “Th e Garden” combine a fountain, a fruit tree, boughs, and the benign
presence of a bird. Th e lines from “To his Coy Mistress,” on the other hand, project
the coupling of two predatory birds as equals. Mrs. Ramsay is described in precisely the
terms from “Th e Garden.” She produces a “delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of
life” (TTL 34), such that “James…felt her rise in a rosy-fl owered fruit tree laid with leaves
and dancing boughs” (35). But in calling notice to Mr. Ramsay’s intrusive “beak of brass”
(34), and in referring to that beak’s form as a “scimitar” (35), Woolf invokes the shape of
beak characteristic of Marvell’s “birds of prey.” Th e male raptor of “To his Coy Mistress”
has in that case fl own out of his own poem and into “Th e Garden.” When Mr. Ramsay’s
curved and hooked beak “plunged and smote” (35) in among his wife’s “delicious fecundity,” it