The Old Woman

One thing I was confused with in Mrs. Dalloway was the old beggar woman.  She doesn't seem to have much of a place in the novel. Part of me thought that she represented Lucrezia's future, that after Septimus died, she would grow old and impoverished.  That does not seem incredibly likely; it seems a bit far-fetched, as there is nothing solid to connect the two.  She sings about her lover, with whom she had walked in May.  In the notes, it mentions a possible connection to a Richard Strauss song.  I looked around, and the lied, Allerseelen, is about a lover reminiscing on love that happened in May, and mourning.  The text is a poem by the Austrian poet Hermann von Gilm zu Rosenegg.  Here is a translation:

All Souls' Day

The fragrant mignonettes put on the table,

And bring in the last red asters,

Then let us speak of love again

Like once in May.

Furtively give me your hand to squeeze

And if anyone sees us, I don't mind at all.

Just give me one of your sweet glances, 

Like once in May.

Today every grave blooms and shines.

Yes, one day a year the dead are freed.

So come, my heart, and be again my own

Like once in May.

Mignonettes and asters are funeral flowers, and All Soul's Day is a day of mourning and prayer for the souls of the dead.  It seems that Woolf connect a woman she had seen on the street with the poem, as the connections between the two warrant more than coincidence.  The people were in love in May, and the woman says to Peter, "give me your hand so that I may press it gently and if someone should see, what matter they?," an almost direct quotation (though she probably would have seen a different translation.) Woolf must have been familiar with Strauss' song (it was published in 1887, and written two years before that,) or the poem.  Some people have taken it that the speaker of the poem is dead, and that the "table" is a headstone.  This doesn't go along with Woolf's use of it, though, as the woman is alive, and is mourning.  The notes speak of the return of the lover on All Soul's Day, so I think that the woman is the speaker of the poem.  Woolf talks about the woman having sung for "infinite ages," and says that the woman will "still be there in ten million years."  I think this means that there will always be love lost to death.  This perhaps foreshadows Rezia's loss of Septimus.  My opinion is that Woolf liked the poem, and worked it into her novel as the old woman.