LIMUHAG
THE LYRIC ESSAY
The students were asked to read two texts: “The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf and Prof. Cruz’s notes on the Lyric Essay. They were also asked to watch the YouTube video regarding the discussion of Suzanne Roberts on the Lyric Essay. After which, the discussion on the board revolved around the student’s explanation as to why they think Woolf’s essay can be considered a lyric essay.
"I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been." This line is taken from the letter of Virginia Woolf to Leonard Woolf in the movie "The Hours." You can watch the scene on this YouTube link.
The Death of a Moth by Virginia Woolf can be considered as a lyric essay because of its narrative, the play of vivid imagery, its poetic lines, and musicality.
The structure of the essay for me is similar to a story told in a linear narrative. A persona narrating the journey of the moth which is a metaphor to how we live; how it desperately thrives on living its one-day lifespan, how it faced its death while other living organisms around the moth lived a little in ease without the fear of death. However, as the persona narrates, he/she is reflective and very keen at the same time. The persona’s keenness became a tool in the play of vivid imagery, which presents the imaginative form that a lyric essay has. In addition, the metaphor in the life of the moth in the essay can be interpreted and fleshed out in various ways, like how a lyric essay is free of interpretation.
The musicality and poetic lines observed in the poem are apparent, especially at the beginning. The shift in tone and mood; sadness, sympathy, curiosity, and the like are also clear, making the poem a lyric essay.
DISCUSSION
It is impressive how Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” captured both the ideas of life and death through the image of a Moth. With the use of that imagery, the author was able to subtly conceal the information on how humans, just like the Moth, struggle to live day by day and yet are eventually bound to death despite the attempt to live longer. Moreover, with the help of imagery, the write up was able to convey the information artistically and also, it was able to have a touch of poetry in it, given the fact that poets use the same technique in their poems. Furthermore, the musicality of lines, particularly the last one, "O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am," also strengthened the poetic aspect of the writeup.
Aside from being impressed, I was also challenged to take cognitive leaps as the essay created webs that connected one scene, idea, or information to another. I would say, one moment the essay talked about the Moth then another moment, it went on talking about the plough, rooks, energies, and everything in between them, which really made me imagine the events happening there so I would not get lost. Having said that, that characteristic of the writeup leans more to an essay because as mentioned before in one of our lessons, the essay is an attempt, in which the author has no predetermined idea on where exactly to go, hence creating a work that might be as messed up as the Moth’s direction of flight.
With all those things mentioned, indeed Woolf's essay can be considered as a lyric essay which I enjoyed reading and immersing myself in, at the same time.
Woolf’s “Death of a Moth” is considered a lyric essay because it displays and employs different literary characteristics and attributes that are commonplace in the genre of the lyric essay. An obvious example of this is the seemingly reticent nature of the persona, who reveals almost nothing about their own life and instead focuses on the poetic image of the dying moth set against the windowpane. This emphasis on the ‘image’ is also another major aspect of the lyric essay, showing how the essayist (Woolf) uses the poet’s obsession with imagery and form along with the narrative styles and progression of a fictionist. Examples of these images are the detailed musings about the rooks, the events and sceneries of the field, and the description of the little moth itself.
The essay also strays from the discursive and persuasive nature of the traditional narrative essay and instead chooses to focus on Woolf’s “meditation” on the image she is witnessing and its poetic nature. As mentioned by Suzanne Roberts in her brief description of the lyrical essay, the lyrical essay asks its readers to make more cognitive “leaps” in comparison to the narrative-based essay, and I think that this holds true for Woolf’s work. The essay relies on implications and seems to point towards what is not explicitly stated in the text. This rings true to the notion that the lyric essay “does not expound, it may merely mention”. Lastly, the essay also has an inherent musicality to it which only highlights the poetic aspect of the text that works in harmony with the narrative progression of the essay.
Taking all these elements into consideration, I believe that “Death of a Moth” is not only fit to be considered a lyric essay but is rather an exemplary work in this specific genre of the essay.
Reading Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Death of the Moth” had given me a chance to be more intuitive of the subject it was trying to discuss. I initially thought it described what infertility a lover’s man may feel but then I started realizing it may also be about the mere illustration of how humans desire to make the most of their existence despite the insignificance of it all as everything dies. The essay actually allowed me to be the stakeholder of its meaning which led me to believe that it is a lyric essay. Aside from that, the essay engrossed itself with such vivid images as poems do but it did not bother explaining said images as thoroughly as traditional essays do. Just embodied truths trying to hide behind the image of a moth. I also noticed the musicality of the prose as if Woolf treated each sentence as lines of a poem. Although it had qualities of poetry, it managed to present discursive logic in a playful manner as essays do. Suzanne Roberts suggested taking the form of a lyric essay in “accessing difficult materials” and what could be a harder material than the concept of death and life, right?
This is quite an interesting subject that got me pondering about the difference between Doyle's essay and Woolf's essay. However, after a simple look at a poem would reveal the contrast. Lyric essay is flexible. It borrows the techniques from the essay as well as the poem. It might be structured and rigid like an essay, it might be not. Lyric essay has the freedom to be more versatile for authors who are not quite sure what style of writing to employ. In Woolf's essay, the lyricism is found in the subtlety of delivering its theme in a series of contrasting images. You can also hear the musicality in the way Woolf, cut off her sentences as if imitating line segments. The essay doesn't present information. It shows a story to deliver its message. In Doyle's essay, he's pretty straightforward. He presents information as it is and then build upon it to conclude with his theme. However, in this essay, Woolf tells us a story of a moth dying, which begs the question: what is the essay all about? Perhaps, she wants to emphasize the temporariness of life. Or perhaps, she wants to say that nothing, big or small, escapes death. Regardless, in her essay, filled with an arc, a narrative, a persona—all which are reminiscent of a/an prose/essay—she also combined it with the lyricism of poetry. It felt like a short story (a flash fiction perhaps?) to be honest that in conclusion, it is indeed a lyric essay.
According to Suzanne Roberts, a lyric essay is written in prose but involves an obsession with image--a technique that a poet uses. And Virginia Woolf's "The Death of the Moth" also conveys its idea using poetic language, particularly an extended metaphor through a dying moth clinging to life. This author's approach, including the tone, allows the reader to connect with the image emotionally: the sharing of sympathy towards the moth, thus creating intimacy. Another reason why "The Death of the Moth" is considered a lyric essay is that it allows its reader to create meaning (to participate) or to think and tell about what does the text is trying to say through connotations: how humans are struggling to live, or about death being inevitable, or how humans are trying to live the best as they can despite the certainty of death, or struggling will only end through death, etc. In connection to this, I also think that the pieces of images used in the essay are mosaicked to create such intuitive meanings.
From the definition provided by Roberts, Tall, D'Agata, and Bonnaffons, we can say that Virginia Woolf's "The Death of a Moth" is a lyrical essay as it has the musicality and language seen in poetry, and the relayed insights and ideas we can observe in poetry. Moreover, it merely mentions its ideas and relies upon the readers to think on its insight, but it provides repetition on its images, the sense of pity (ie. little, fragile) to make a clear suggestion that the life, and death, of the moth, means more to the writer and potentially to the reader as well. While the essay has a story structure, it is only a passing mention, as the experience could be nothing more than an elaborate metaphor displayed as a fragmented recollection that strikes a nuanced feeling to the author about their life. After all, what compels a person to remember a simple memory such as witnessing a dying moth?
Suzanne Roberts mentioned that the lyric essay borrows elements from both fiction and poetry, and we can see this in Virginia Woolf's "The Death of the Moth." In her essay, Woolf utilized poetic devices such as metaphor and personification in conveying the intricate details presented in the text. There were also evident leaps in the narrative and an abundance in imagery. More so, this essay did not stray from the claim that "the lyric essay does not expound." In here, we see how Woolf's essay suggest something, perhaps an experience of the essayist or her state of mind, and yet, it did not expound on the idea. It allowed the readers to take part in the narrative, in creating conjectures and meanings behind the lines; it gave room to reflections as though we were meditating on the concept of life and death.
Virginia Woolf's "The Death of the Moth" can be considered as a lyric essay not just because it is an essay and because it used poetic devices. As Suzzane Roberts vaguely defined the lyric essay as an essay about one thing but it's not really about that thing, "The Death of the Moth" is clearly an essay that is not about the Moth's death. The essay describes how the Moth has lived and died, but the narrative may also imply that it is about another person's death or generally, the death of all of us. The use of metaphors and images that poets use in poems allow the lyric essay to make the point across to the audience, without having to narrate the whole event. This way, it becomes easier for the writer to write about things that are not emotionally easy to write about because there are a lot of memories that they would not want to re-live (which reminds me of how writers write memoirs to come to terms with their experiences).
When I first read the essay, I thought that the essay was too emotionally detached. There was little to no empathy to the Moth that has died as it was described only as pitiful and pathetic. But I am reminded that the lyric essay, and essay in general, is a writer's tool to speak their truth. And maybe, a little emotional detachment from the Moth shows how Woolf wanted to detach herself from death and only express how helpless she felt against it.
The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf narrates the ephemeral life of a moth the author saw one September morning. Traditional essays often explicitly tell the readers what it is trying to say. However, in this essay, the insight is not delivered to us along the typical line of “I realize” or through retrospective epiphany. The form is also compact; within a span of a thousand words, the essay described the activities of the moth until its last breath juxtaposed by images of life – the birds, plowing of the fields, horses, etc. -- outside the writer’s room. The techniques used in the essay are reminiscent of poetry which is a form that unsays what it speaks about. This is evident in how Virginia Woolf observed how the world outside went on and was unaware of the moth’s struggle against death which is a powerful metaphor about the transience of life. Though Woolf leans on narration more than fragmentary storytelling the way poems do, she still conveys her meaning through poetic conventions such as images, lines, and metaphors. The Death of the Moth demonstrates those qualities which for me qualifies the essay to be considered as a lyric essay.
One thing I cannot forget from that youtube with Suzzane Roberts on what a lyric essay is, is that she says, Lyric Essay is like Poetry and Essay’s love child. By reading Virgina Woolf’s essay “The Death of the Moth”, I think it would be considered as a lyric essay by the way the essay is written. In the previous essays we read in the past weeks, the essay has been more persuasive and more inclined to expressing logical facts but written in an engaging, creative and sometimes personal way, like how Montaigne writes his essays for example. But in Woolf’s essay, it is more suited in what Seneca Review says about lyric essays that it gives priority to creativity over conveying information. The Death of the Moth is talking about or comparing the struggles of human life by relating it to that of a moth. It’s metaphoric like poetry but still faithful to the original sense of an essay that it is a test; to try.
Woolf's essay displays specific characteristics of a lyric essay, as it holds images and metaphors while ruminating its readers with the facts she wants them to know. The essay manifests both lyric qualities by presenting the moth as the main metaphor for life, and the essay in its attempt to present a knowledge which she later points out that "death is stronger than I am." Conclusively, I think the essay embodies both qualities to form a "collage" or a picture with a completely new meaning that the author intended to "ruminate" on her readers.
Woolf’s The Death of the Moth centers its subject around the fickle life of a desperate moth stuck on the window pane, retelling the strangeness of life and of death. With rich imageries both of the setting – the rooks, the field, even the atmosphere of a September day – and of the bead of life that is the moth, the essay shares the musicality of the language, the stories in metaphors that poetry holds. The essay is also suggestive rather than an overt narration of the theme through its factual, yet metaphorical, story of the moth’s struggle. As it gives words to the moth and an image to what has transpired, the voice is both intimate and personal. There is also a poetic logic in the author’s reflections of the once fluttering moth that has then become stiff with death. With this balance between the elements of poetry and of an essay, Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth can be considered a lyrical essay.
Woolf's "The Death of the Moth" circulates on the activities of the little moth through the point of view of the speaker, but it does not only talk about that one thing, it extends to various subjects in relation to it, then goes back again to featuring the moth. It is a lyric essay due to its web of interconnected ideas, its poetic description of thoughts and comments, and its display of a particular experience (the moth through the speaker's perspective) that somehow becomes a universal message: the totalitarian power of death. Moreover, Woolf's essay, similar to the lyric essay's attempt of no foreknown conclusion, offers rooms for the readers' own interpretations. Was the moth really pathetic for its limitedness? or was the moth strikingly bold to even try, considering its smallness and helplessness, to fight against the ruthless verdict of death?
Personally, I find Woolf's lyric essay a very interesting one--how she is able to build a sentimental meaning to something so mundane.
The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf may seem as simply an observation by Woolf to the moth struggling for its life and, in the end, met its inevitable death. There are three points why this essay is considered a lyric essay. First, it takes the form of a mosaic. When seen from afar, the essay does not only talk about what happened to the moth but rather something deep, as we can see Woolf telling her truths once in a while in the essay. We can say it talks about the human struggle, forces that are too significant for us to control no matter how great our efforts are, the human death, or maybe it talks about the female struggle living in a patriarchal world. The point is, the truths are told in patches that can only be seen if one looks from afar. Second, the essay is very visual in a way that it clearly tells whatever is happening to the moth, from its actions to what can also be seen in its environment both factually and metaphorically. According to Susan Griffin, lyric essays have an “openness to visuality as a tool of meaning-making,” which Woolf’s essay used to express its “embodied truths”. The third is the use of poetic language. There is a certain balance between art and fact in Woolf’s essay. It also makes use of silence. If imagined, the whole scene of the moth moves in silence, and in this, we readers become immersed in forming meaning to it, allowing us to “reconcoct meaning from the bombardments of experience”.
Woolf’s The Death of the Moth can be considered a lyric essay because “it spirals in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea” which is death. It is ruminative in a way that it as Woolf deliberately crafted the reader’s experience through the death of the moth. The essay is also what Suzane Roberts said “it is obsessed with imageries”. These imageries are evident from the beginning of the essay. Through the author’s first point of view, she describes her morning around summer with the whole scenery from outside her window as she witnesses the moth struggling to escape her window. Moreover, the essay “approach the world through the front door, through the myth of objectivity” as Woolf ended her essay with the thought of no one really cares about the struggles you have, the same as “there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth”. This thought was Woolf’s discovery as she observed that the moth struggled for its life that “no one else valued and desired to keep” and according to her, “moved one strangely.”
The essay The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf will seem, on first read, as some sort of mere depiction of the struggle and death of a common moth. But when read carefully, the essay actually reveals a metaphorical take on life and death. For me, the primary reason why this essay is considered a lyric essay is first, it’s fragmented manner of telling. In the essay, most of what we see are snippets of many vivid images. We can see this especially in the beginning of the essay as it leaps from one image to another, and this was further developed as the essay progressed. This mosaic of vivid images gives readers a more sense of experience, and then these images were latched to the inner thoughts of the narrator which tells us that the essay is not merely as it seems. Which leads to the second reason: this essay is a reflective and philosophical take on life guised in the depiction of the struggle of the moth. As said by Deborah Tall, lyric essays favors “idiosyncratic meditation.” This essay by Virginia Woolf used the image of the moth to explore and deal with some meaningful truths about human existence—especially of the inevitability of struggling and death. And lastly, the wonderful use of poetic language, along with the aforementioned reasons, qualifies this as a lyric essay.
Woolf’s essay is a lyrical essay that employs the same technique that poetry uses in the way it utilizes the image that it used. The message heavily relies on the image of the moth that is used. With the description of what the moth looks like, how it moves, and its corpse contributed to the complexity of the message that it explicitly said in the end line: “O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am”.
Given this, I was honestly a little confused on where and how the cognitive leap that the readers must make (in lyrical essays) was supposed to be taken. I took into account the other images that were also mentioned such as the world outside the room that the persona was occupying. In which, I realized that the death of the moth intertwined with the bigger world outside the room was alluding to another message. Although the moth dying already sent a message about the inevitability of death, if intertwined with the image of the world, it gives a much more complex and depressing message which is: we’re all as insignificant as this Moth. Even when the moth was fighting its battle which it ultimately lost, the world outside kept on going. For the moth, it was its’ last day, for the world: it was just like any other day. And when our last day comes, it’s going to be exactly like that.
It’s poetic in its use of the mages and the interplay of these to show the complex message it portrays.
Photo Reference by Taryn Elliott