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Woolf’s story is packed with lyrical language. The house is personified as a living thing with a heartbeat that gladly tells the narrator and the ghostly couple that they are safe and that the treasure of love belongs to them. The opening and shutting doors are compared to the pulse of a heart.
The author also personifies the wood pigeons outside the house. In their contentment, the pigeons make bubbling noises. Their bubbling is onomatopoetic, imitating the sound the birds make. Similarly, the threshing machine hums, the word hum suggests the sound it makes. The wind also “roars” up the avenue.
Death is a metaphorical glass, at once a barrier between the living and the dead and a mirror in which the realms might be reflected. It separates the dead wife from her living husband before his later passing and divides the ghostly couple of the story from the living one, while at the same time suggesting that the lives of the living reflect that of the dead.
The silence of the house is compared to a well, deep and dark. Wood pigeons draw bubbles of sound as people would draw water from a well. The water metaphors continue when, at night, the moonbeams “splash and spill wildly in the rain,” as if they, like the raindrops, are a disordered liquid. In contrast, the light from the lamp “falls straight from the window,” more like domesticated water from a tap.
