Discuss the Elements of Poetry and Music in Mrs. Dalloway

Elements of Poetry and Music in Mrs. Dalloway

 
Mrs. Dalloway is very much like ‘a musical fugue in construction’. Like a piece of music it has a backward and forward rhythmical movement. The movement follows an alternating pattern. At first the focal point is in the consciousness of Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway. From this point the movement swings away in space, backward in time, opening up long vistas of experience and character, and then forward again to the particular day of the clock-time. Then another fixed point regarding both time and space is June morning and Bond street. The third fixed point is the consciousness of Septimus and Lucrezia. There is again a backward and forward movement from this point. Thus, the novel is an artistic whole like a piece of music.

 

Virginia Woolf has used in her novel the technique of poet to enhance the expressiveness and richness of her diction. Her style is poetic and like a poet she has used plenty of poetic imagery, metaphor and symbol. She uses words with a keen sense of their rhythmical and musical potentialities. R.L. Chambers points out that her metaphors are not metaphors of prose, even of romantic prose. They are metaphors are not of poetry. They are often collection of ideas made by that transmutation of the laws of association which is normally possible only to the genius of poetry.