Kew Gardens

“Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.”

The narrator describes a point of contact between the flowers and pedestrians in the garden. Light and color reflect off the flowers and dew and onto the people walking by the flowerbed. This is an early example of Woolf using descriptive yet abstract diction to illustrate the connectivity between humans and nature.

“All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say ‘Yes’ at once.”

Simon recalls his marriage proposal to Lily, and his recognition that the twitch of her shoe indicated her forthcoming rejection. However, he held onto hope by attaching meaning to a nearby dragonfly. His detailed recall of an event from 15 years earlier illustrates the intensity of Moments of Being.

“Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, […] one’s happiness, one’s reality?”

Prior to this quotation, Simon asks Eleanor if she minds him thinking about the past. Eleanor’s response demonstrates her understanding of the value such contemplations can have. Moreover, she acknowledges the meditative powers of an enriching natural environment such as Kew Gardens.