"Fear no more the heat o' the sun
Nor the furious winter's rages.":
These two lines allude to Shakespeare's 24 line poem from Cymbeline. King Cymbeline’s daughter marries a peasant in secret. When their secret is found out, the peasant is exiled to Italy where he makes a bet with a man who says that he can seduce the peasant’s wife. The man travels to Brittan to seduce to princess. When she refuses, he sneaks into her bedchambers and steals a bracelet. After hearing the description of his wife's chambers and seeing the bracelet, the peasant believes his wife betrayed him and orders another man to go kill his wife. Woolf uses allusion to Cymbeline to develop a sad tone. The poem Woolf is quoting is about how death will come at the end of struggling through life. This allusion also serves to show the theme of loneliness in the book. Mrs. Dalloway lives in a busy, populated city, but she feels lonely or seems alone in her thoughts. After Mrs. Dalloway struggles through life, she will die. Woolf struggled with depression and eventually committed suicide; death preoccupied her and she felt isolated in her depressed state. Woolf shared the poem view of death as being welcome, and she alludes to these feelings in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa thinks these lines again later in the story (pg. 29) and even Septimus thinks “fear no more” to himself (pg. 136).
Caleb Murdock. The Poem Tree. An Online Poetry Anthology. 9 October 2006. 25 September 2009. http://www.poemtree.com/poems/FearNoMoreTheHeat.htm
“Cymbeline.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 25 September 2009. 25 September 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymbeline
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