“Virginia Woolf”  Words and music by Emily Saliers ; from the Indigo Girls album Rites of Passage (1992)

Some will strut and some will fret, see this an hour on the stage

Others will not but they’ll sweat in their hopelessness, in their rage.

We’re all the same, the men of anger and the women of the page.

 

They published your diary and that’s how I got to know you

Key to the room of your own and a mind without end.

Here’s a young girl on a kind of a telephone line through time

The voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend

So I know I’m all right, my life will come, my life will go

Still I feel it’s all right, I just got a letter to my soul

 

When my whole life is on the tip of my tongue,

Empty pages for the no longer young

The apathy of time laughs in my face

You say each life has it’s place

 

The hatches were battened, thunderclouds rolled and the critics stormed

Battles surrounded the white flag of your youth

But if you need to know that you weathered the storm of cruel mortality

A hundred years later I’m sitting here living proof

 

So you know it’s all right, your life will come, your life will go

Still you’ll feel it’s all right, someone will get a letter to your soul

When your whole life was on the tip of your tongue

Empty pages for the no longer young

The apathy of time laughed in your face

Did you hear me say each life has its place.

 

The place where you hold me is dark in a pocket of truth

The moon has swallowed the sun and the light of the earth

And so it was for you when the river eclipsed your life

But sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me and it was my rebirth

 

So we know it’s all right, life will come and life will go

Still we know it’s all right, someone will get a message to your soul

Then you know it’s all right

(when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue, empty pages for the no longer young)

Then you know it’s all right and you feel it’s all right

(each life has its place, you say each life has its place)

It’s all right

The song was inspired by the following passage from Woolf’s diary, written upon witnessing a total eclipse of the sun in 1927:

“Then –it was over till 1999. What remained was the sense of the comfort which we get used to, of plenty of light, and colour. . . .  Yet when it became established all over the country, one rather missed the sense of its being a relief and a respite, which one had had when it came back after the darkness.”  (Thursday, June 30, 1927)

Virginia Woolf seminar, University of Alabama, Huntsville, [Created June 30, 1997; Updated June 30, 1997]