Cushioned in a poetic, meta-textual interlude in Chapter VI of Orlando, this sentence initiates a significant transformation in the tone and pace of the narration. This change is inextricably related to the nature of the sentence as a complex intertextual statement, referencing and tapping the rhythm of the opening lines of T. S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915): ‘Let us go then, you and I / when the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherised upon the table’. The sentence is preceded by a paragraph in which the narrator playfully departs from the not-so-inspiring protagonist in search of life elsewhere, that is, outside the human consciousness trapped in the labours of imagination and cogitation. On the other side, the sentence ushers us into a carefully metered, poetic passage, later also included in Vita Sackville- West's anthology of poetry, Another World than This. This passage tracks, indeed rejoices in, the different species of life, including and beyond the human subject, and culminates in the question that punctuates this chapter in Orlando: ‘What is life?’ This inquiry is presented in the text as simultaneously pompous, genuinely urgent, and ultimately unresolvable. The only answer the narrator provides seems to be that of actively ‘in-taking’ life rather than reflecting on it. Prompted by the suggestion of an intimate investigation in Woolf's (and Eliot’s) sentence, my chapter examines this response and the interstices of semantics, poetics and gender that both separate and bind Woolf's and Eliot's narrators and their exploratory gestures.

Woolf's sentence interacts closely, through its syntax, rhythmical arrangement and even lexical choice, with the first three lines of Eliot's poem. The components of Eliot's first line, ‘Let us go then, you and I’, are replicated and retained in their syntactic source-place, save for the insertion of ‘exploring’ instead of ‘you and I’; the accentual line is watchfully mirrored. This close correspondence is further emphasised through Woolf's strategic placement of the sentence at the beginning of a paragraph. Eliot's second line, ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky’, is rephrased and repositioned after the Woolfian interlude ‘this summer morning’.