Mrs. Dalloway

whimpering, snivelling old ass. But women, he thought, shutting his
pocket-knife, don’t know what passion is. They don’t know the meaning
of it to men. Clarissa was as cold as an icicle. There she would sit
on the sofa by his side, let him take her hand, give him one kiss--Here
he was at the crossing.

A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up
without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly
and with an absence of all human meaning into

    ee um fah um so
    foo swee too eem oo--

the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting
from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube station
from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a
wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up
and down its branches singing

    ee um fah um so
    foo swee too eem oo

and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.

Through all ages--when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp,
through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise,
the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed,
her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has