Virginia Woolf Poem by Sheena Blackhall

The year that she was born, her father bought
Talland House, set in a Cornish Town
A lighthouse stood nearby, a summer gem
She'd hear the wavescrash from her bedroom window

Her half-brother abused her in her childhood
Behind closed doors, for years, endured in silence

Her father was a product ofEton and Cambridge,
A literary critic, upper middle class,
Writers and thinkers were frequent visitors

She was home schooled from her father's library
Admired the work ofFyodor Dostoevsky.
Called his novels ‘seething whirlpools…
Waterspouts which hiss and boil …' A fan.

Stream-of-consciousness, words flow like waves
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust
Faulkner.Kerouac, and Samuel Beckett
The unchained mind slips like a running noose

Dirk Bogarde, raised in a village near at hand
Recalled she wore a floppy, large straw hat
His playmates thought her a witch who sang to herself

Her psychiatrist George Savage thought instability
Arose from bacteria in the roots of teeth
Had three of hers pulled out, to no avail
Equated bipolar issues with poor dentistry

Her husband Leonard kept a marmoset
An odd companion in an eccentric household
She wrote at a standing desk, a preacher's stance

The couple, members of the Bloomsbury Group,
Supported gay rights, women in the arts,
Free love, pacifism, open marriage
Indulged in affairs, were ultra liberal

In an 18th cottage called Monk's House,
She wrote her famous Mrs. Dalloway,
Written in a shed in the garden grounds.

Woolfhad a host of admirers of both genders.
Was married to Leonard Woolfnigh thirty years
Was a feminist Icon, complex character

In 1941, she filled her coat with rocks
And walked into the river behind her house.
Three weeks later, they found her in the Ouse

Stream-of-consciousness, words flow like waves
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust
Faulkner.Kerouac, and Samuel Beckett
The unchained mind slips like a running noose

Her ashes were interred beneath two elm trees
Entwined, where his dust followed later on