Charles Elton's 'A Garden Song'; or, 'Luriana, Lurilee': Another Inscription by Leonard Woolf: The Original Version of the Poem?

Abstract

THE quotations from Charles Isaac Elton's poem ‘Luriana, Lurilee’, in Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, are well known. The poem was originally titled ‘A Garden Song’; its history, and Leonard Woolf's manuscript copy of it in his personal notebook of quotations and lists of books, are discussed in two previous Notes.1,2 This manuscript copy is hereinafter referred to as the notebook version.3 Further research shows that Leonard Woolf also inscribed the poem in his copy of Aristotelis Ethica Nicomachea.4 This inscription is hereinafter referred to as the Aristotelis copy: A Garden Song Come out & climb the garden-path, Luriana Lurilee,The China rose is all abloom & buzzing w. the yellow bee We’ll swing you on the cedar-bough, Lur. Lur. I wonder if it seems to you Luriana Lurillee That all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be Are full of trees & waving leaves, Lur. Lur. How long it seems since you & I, Lur. Lur. Roamed in the forest where our kind had just begun to be, And laughed & chattered in the flowers, Lur. Lur. How long since you & I went out, Lur. Lur To see the kings go riding by over lawn & daisylea With their palm-sheaves & cedar-leaves Lur. Lur Swing, swing on the cedar bough! Lur. Lur. Till you sleep in a bramble-heap or under thegloomy churchyard-tree, And then fly back to swing on a bough, Lur. Lur. Whitsuntide 1899 Charles Isac [sic] Elton5