Said oft before
and to be said again:
just as one thinks
there can be no more
come upon perchance
a pair of unknowns
scribbled one day
as a playful jest
for the dearest
the two nearest
to those
she never had.
- Anne Dromache
On the discovery of two unknown poems by Virginia Woolf.
Discovered by chance at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas by the University of Liverpool academic Dr. Sophie Oliver, are two little poems by Virginia Woolf, written for her niece and nephew, Angelica and Quentin Bell, presumably sometime after March 1927. Says Dr. Oliver in the opening paragraph of her just published piece in the Times Literary Supplement:
Two poems by Virginia Woolf have resurfaced. I found them tucked in the back of a folder of letters to her niece Angelica Bell in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Light verse, quickly drafted for her niece and nephew (Quentin Bell) in pencil on two sheets of the same grey-blue paper, “Angelica” and “Hiccoughs” delight in fantasy and invention. […]The manuscripts join a handful of extant poems by this novelist, who as a young woman could not get on with poetry and as a mature author declared it “defunct”. […] like most of Woolf’s other known poems, it takes up poetry to do something; in this case to play, poke and charm, and to help with what Angelica thought was one of her aunt’s greatest gifts, creating intimacies with people.
–‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’ by Sophie Oliver, TLS January 17, 2025.
Oliver goes on to mention some other known examples. That written as a child for the Hyde Park Gate News is known to me, the others not:
Woolf’s earliest known poem is a quatrain written (c.1892) for the Hyde Park Gate News, the whimsical newspaper that she and her siblings produced. A mother looking after her sick son, as Woolf’s mother did for many in need, is compared to a predatory animal: “Like the vulture hovers / O’er the dieing horse / thinking ever thinking / that her boy is slowly sinking”. Already, at ten years old, Woolf understood the comic power of a perverse image and a dippy rhyme. “Ode written partly in prose on seeing the name of Cutbush above a butcher’s shop in Pentonville” (1934) is, as the immoderate title suggests, a narrative poem that exceeds the bounds of poetry. “Fantasy upon a Gentleman Who Converted His Impressions of a Private House into Cash” (1937), meanwhile, is a satire that uses occasional rhyme to skewer a journalist’s complacency (“his lack of attraction; his self-satisfaction”).
–‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’ by Sophie Oliver, TLS January 17, 2025.
Without a subscription I can get no further! But an interesting find to be sure, that says something about the ‘Aunt’ Virginia and is supportive of Vanessa’s children’s later recollections of her; as being somewhat ‘other’, shall we say, but always lots of fun and a kindred spirit of sorts – creative and playful.
The style of the two poems and the tonality one hears is also indicative of what one could imagine Woolf would have heard in the nursery as a child herself – Lear, for example – and one is reminded of the power of such words, rhymes and rhythms to stay with one a life long.