Still Roses: June 15, 2015

Roses at St. Paul's by Paula Maggio

Let us examine the rose.  We have seen it so often flowering in bowls, connected it so often with beauty in its prime, that we have forgotten how it stands, still and steady, through an entire afternoon in the earth.  It preserves a demeanour of perfect dignity and self-possession.  The suffusion of its petals is of inimitable rightness.  Now perhaps one deliberately falls; now all the flowers, the voluptuous purple, the creamy in whose waxen flesh the spoon has left a swirl of cherry juice. . . . There they stand; and it is of these, the stillest, the most self-sufficient of all things that human beings have made companions.
(OBI 14-5)

June 15, 1930 
Woolf was setting type for "On Being Ill"