Mrs. Dalloway Six

"It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow. She had gone up into the tower alone and left them blackberrying in the sun." (Woolf 47)

Virginia Woolf has a similar idea in Mrs. Dalloway as Seamus Heaney in his poem, Blackberry Picking. Everything was over for Clarissa Dalloway, such as things were for the characters in the poem upon realizing that all their preciously picked fruit had gone to waste because of their greed.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair.

Clarissa has more than most women her age could ask for, yet she finds herself in a sticky situation where she doesn't know what she wants and even more she cannot control everyone's fate around her. It all seems very unfair. 


Blackberry Picking, Seamus Heaney
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Brace and, 1925. Print.