Krista Hannesen

A Window Into the Soul: The Beauty of Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”

"Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden?"

In the wonderfully vibrant “Kew Gardens,” Virginia Woolf captures the feeling of being in a public garden by using imagery and vivid language to describe the world around the speaker. For example, she talks about the “petals” being “stirred by the “summer breeze”, and invokes an image of that by following those words with: “when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other” (Woolf). She also mentions that the “the breeze stirred rather more briskly” and gets into “into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July” (Woolf). By merging imagery of the landscape with the people the speaker sees around them, Woolf gives the reader a feeling of everything they would see while out in the garden. While reading, it feels as though you are people-watching while feeling a breeze go through your hair and seeing the breeze drift onto the people around you. The breeze connects all the people in the garden - a metaphor for how we are all connected despite our different walks of life.

If I were to describe the plot, I would say that “Kew Gardens” is a story about the different kinds of people who go through Kew Gardens, and how many different walks of life converge in one place and in one moment of time to share the beauty of the gardens. I would say that Woolf is showing the beauty of everyday life and how life connects to nature.

kew.org

To further this idea, a moment that appears particularly ‘intense’ to me is when the speaker mentions the snail and the “green insect” (Woolf). This moment is intense to me because she notes that the snail “labours[s] over the crumbs of loose earth” and moves “very slightly” (Woolf). Soon after, she says that the insect walked away “rapidly and strangely” (Woolf). I found this interesting because I think Woolf is saying that while to the speaker, or the audience reading, the question may be “so what? Just some bugs,” but to the snail and the insect, this is their whole life.

In my opinion, this moment in the text is a metaphor for the story as a whole. Each person has their own story and things that happened behind closed doors that no one else knows about. But people on the outside only see part of their story, the public side of that person. Woolf illustrates this by showing the reader a window of the different people in the garden.

It seems as though the speaker is merely hearing passing conversations in the garden. Still, they are actually getting a small glimpse into the old man’s troubled life, the married couples, wistful marriage, and the “tableau” that really spoke to me, the young couple. Woolf alludes to the idea that we get a glimpse of a person’s life in this story when she shows the couple connecting when they touch hands (Woolf). Their connection has now changed their lives forever, no matter what comes out of their relationship. In a small way, the speaker is a part of that piece of history, as through the speaker, so is the reader. And that is the beauty of Woolf's window into the garden and the souls that stroll through it.