I am! Well, maybe not afraid. Perhaps cowed.

I’ve just started reading To the Lighthouse for the first time in about 12 years. (I’m reading it for  the class “Consciousness from Austen to Virginia Woolf,” with literary critic James Wood; we are tracking the way nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers enter the consciousness of characters). In previous reads, I’ve marveled at the giant leap Woolf takes into stream-of-consciousness writing. I love wallowing in Woolf’s metaphors and Mrs. Ramsey’s full-blown inner monologues.

Separately, this week I’ve been thinking about what I call “melody”—the use of sound in sentences, whether alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, or rhyme. (See my lessons for writers for ideas on this.) I have suggested that writers sit near a window when it’s raining, or near the ocean, or near a fountain, and listen to the water, finding words that in some way echo the flow.

Then I read this passage in To the Lighthouse:

The monotonous fall of waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, “I am guarding you, and am your support,” but at other times, suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.”

Notice how Woolf uses “monotonous,” “soothing tattoo,” “repeat over and over again,” and “murmured” when she’s referring to the “kindly meaning” of waves on the beach (and, in turn, to calm or calming thoughts) and then “ghostly roll,” “remorselessly beat,” “thundered hollow,” and “impulse of terror” when she’s referring to more ominous forces of nature and of consciousness. The first set of words murmur with soft syllables, soft consonants, soft vowels. The second set gives us an “uh-oh” with ghostly roll,” followed by the syllables that register like the warning beats of a tympanum.

Subtle, but masterful.

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