Passage Analysis #2-"The Death of a Moth"

“The Death of a Moth”-Virginia Woolf

The same energy [which inspires the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs,] sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of his windowpane. (2) One could not help watching him. (3) One, was, indeed, conscious of a queer feeling of pity for him. (4) The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meager opportunities to the full, pathetic. (5) He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. (6) What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? (7) That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. (8) What he could do he did. (9) Watching him, it seemed as if a fiber, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. (10) As often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. (11) He was little or nothing but life.

The selected passage comes from Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.” As a whole this essay is underlining an essence or energy that Woolf takes notice of in nature and in life generally, which becomes highlighted in a little moth she sees hovering about a window. This particular paragraph appears second in the essay and works to define a struggle that she sees the moth enduring, and in defining this, she in turn ends up defining life.

 Plucking out the very first sentence and stripping it down its core, we are given two things: this concept of energy and a moth, and this energy is what’s dictating the moth’s actions. Moving forward with this in mind, the sentences start to mirror each other in different ways with the use of parallelism, and this parallelism relates ideas back to each other. For example, in sentence one we are given within the adjective clause a parallel list: “the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs” (265), we are then given a similar list in sentence seven, but added is an “of the” to separate each thing, rather than just a “the”: “in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea” (266). The added “of the” creates more weight for the words, giving these things a more heavier emphasis, and since this sentence appears when the moth’s struggle is really being defined, the added weight in a way could correlated with that struggle.   

This moth filled with energy is clearly on a journey, and as we come to the end of this paragraph we see this journey as essentially being life. This little moth is thus described as: “He was little or nothing but life” (266).

            This whole essay is depicting the circle of life; through taking interest in a little moth at her window, Woolf saw life. That life came in the form of energy and that energy gave this little moth determination through his struggles, for even though he was not able to see the vastness of the world this energy still takes him from corner to corner upon the windowpane.

Through the set up of this paragraph, Woolf gave us a visual of the inner workings of this little moth’s battles in a very big world. Through the set up of the essay, she took the idea of life, of the energy that encompasses everything and she gave it a physical persona by place it in the moth.