Rhythm: Breaking the Illusion

Abstract

Where Fry distinguishes the rhythms of life from those of art, in Woolf’s writing the ebb and flow of rhythm seems to pull life into the order of art. In her ‘Letter to a Young Poet’ Woolf champions an elegiac and lyrical rhythmical instinct that has the power to transcend disunity, to make a ‘whole’ out of the ‘separate fragments’ of contemporary experience. Woolf had given a voice to such a young poet in the character of Bernard in The Waves:

But it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always deep below it, even when we arrive punctually at the appointed time with our white waistcoats and polite formalities, a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights — elm trees, willow trees, gardeners sweeping, women writing — that rise and sink even as we hand a lady down to dinner.³

Science, they say, has made poetry impossible; there is no poetry in motor cars and wirelesses. And we have no religion. All is tumultuous and transitional. Therefore, so people say, there can be no relation between the poet and the present age. But surely that is nonsense. These accidents are superficial; they do not go nearly deep enough to destroy the most profound and primitive of instincts, the instinct of rhythm. All you need now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmic sense open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts into another, until the taxis are dancing with daffodils, until a whole has been made from all these separate fragments. I am talking nonsense I know…. I do not know what I mean by rhythm nor what I mean by life.

Virginia Woolf, ‘Letter to a Young Poet’¹

The rhythm seemed to rock and the unintelligible words ran themselves together almost into a shriek … There was something horrible in the noise they made. It was so shrill, so discordant, and so meaningless.

Virginia Woolf, The Years ²