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The Poetry of Virginia Woolf:

Words Robed in Beauty from The Waves

-I- The Nymph of the Fountain

A Ribbon of Weed

Jinny rides like a gull on the wave,
dealing her looks adroitly
here and there,
saying this, 
saying that
with truth.
but I lie,
I prevaricate.

Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view
across the room,
to the balcony under the awning.
I see the sky, softly feathered
with its sudden effulgence of moon.
I also see the railings of the square,
and two people without faces,
leaning like statues against the sky.
When I have passed through this drawing-room,
flickering with tongues
that cut me like knives,
making me stammer,
making me lie,
I find faces rid of features,
robed in beauty.
I am not composed enough,
standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire
to make even one sentence.
What I say is perpetually contradicted.
Each time the door opens,
I am interrupted.
I am not yet twenty-one.
I am to be broken.
I am to be derided all my life.
I am to be cast up and down
among these men and women,
with their twitching faces,
with their lying tongues
like a cork on a rough sea,
Like a ribbon of weed, 
I am flung far
every time the door opens.
I am the foam that sweeps
and fills the uttermost rims 
of the rocks with whiteness.

Crabs

There is the puddle
and I cannot cross it.
The figure that was robed in beauty
is now clothed in ruin.
Now I will walk down Oxford Street,
envisaging a world rent by lightning.
I will look at oaks cracked asunder.
On the bare ground, I will pick violets
and bind them together 
and offer them to Percival.
Look at the street now that Percival is dead.
The houses are lightly founded to be puffed 
over by a breath of air.
Reckless and random 
the cars race and roar
and hunt us to death
like bloodhounds.
I am alone in a hostile world.
The human face is hideous.
Percival has revealed this terror,
has left me to undergo this humiliation –
faces and faces served out like soup-plates
by scullions;
coarse, greedy, casual;
looking in at shop-windows with parcels;
ogling, brushing, destroying everything,
leaving even our love impure,
touched now by their dirty fingers.

Here is the shop where they sell stockings.
Pain is suspended 
as a girl silently slides open a drawer
and then she speaks.
Her voice wakes me.
I shoot to the bottom among the weeds
and see envy, jealousy, hatred and spite
scuttle like crabs over the sand.

Walruses

Here is a hall where one pays money and goes in,
where one hears music among somnolent people.
We have eaten beef and pudding 
enough to live for a week 
without tasting food. 
Therefore, we cluster like maggots 
on the back of something that will carry us on.
Swaying and opening programmes, 
we settle like walruses 
stranded on rocks,
like heavy bodies 
incapable of waddling to the sea,
hoping for a wave to lift us, 
but we are too heavy.
We lie gorged with food,
torpid in the heat.