Cowbind / Bryony
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As Molly Hite points out in her annotations to The Waves, Cowbind is another name for
White Bryony (TW 235) or Bryonia alba, a vine
related to the cucumber, which bears small greenish white flowers in May and
bright red, noxious berries in the fall. Also known as Wild Hops, it grows in
hedges and is “exceedingly common in the south of England.” [1]
Cowbind only
appears twice in Woolf’s oeuvre, both times in The Waves as an element of a garland mentally woven by Rhoda. As
Hite also notes, Woolf’s cowbind is derived not from country walks and direct observation
but from the literary imagination of Percy Shelley. In the third episode of the
novel, as the six children separate to go off the school, Rhoda soothes anxious
solitude by reading a “poem about a hedge” (TW 39), clearly Shelley’s “The
Question” a slightly mournful lyric about gathering spring flowers for a
bouquet without having anyone in particular to give it to. Rhoda’s meandering meditation
follows Shelley’s roll-call of spring flowers, at times almost word for word.
Her desire to wander down the hedge “and pick flowers, green cowbind and the
moonlight-coloured May, wild roses and ivy serpentine” (TW 39-40) corresponds
exactly to Shelley’s third
stanza, with only a few editorial excisions:
And
in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,
Green
cowbind and the moonlight-coloured may,
And
cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine
Was
the bright dew, yet drained not by the day;
And
wild roses, and ivy serpentine.
Like Shelley, Rhoda has no one to
present her flowers to, but later after Percival’s death, eliminating all the
flowers but the “cowbind and the moonlight coloured may,” she reweaves the
literary memory as a mourning garland and imagines tossing it out over a cliff
in Spain, offering its white petals to the sea (TW 151). Cowbind is almost unique in Woolf’s floral
arrangements in being wholly imagined in both its origin and its representation,
a ghostly green flower of the mind.
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