a n n w i e r da row l a n d “There is hardly a sensation more painful than the blank that strikes on the heart, when, instead of the light we expect streaming from some beloved spot where our affections are fondly fixed, all is silent and dark.”43 The sentence moves from an action in the world – “the blank that strikes” – into the shared “heart” of “our affections,” but this heart – both a conventional marker of sensibility and one “fixed” to a “beloved spot” – still remains outside any single, interior subjectivity In case we have missed the implicit invitation to move “our affections” into the novel or to transpose Orlando’s “sensations” into our own, the text next models such an interaction Still standing outside the dark house, Orlando, who is “passionately fond of poetry,” recalls the ballad of Hardyknute: “Theirs nae licht in my lady’s bowir, Theirs nae licht in the hall; Nae blink shynes round my fairly fair – ” And, like the dismayed hero of the song, “Black feir he felt, but what to fear He wist not zit with dreid.”44 Even as it quotes the “simply descriptive stanza” of this popular ballad, Smith’s own descriptive prose is anything but simple She persists in leaving the sentiments which are the central focus of this extended passage unspecified, bound neither to a single subject nor, here, to a specific object: “but what to fear / He wist not zit with dreid.” The tenor and quality of Orlando’s feelings are given shape first by evoking familiar and commonly shared emotion and then by embodying that emotion in familiar and commonly shared lines of poetry through the act of quotation Orlando’s interiority is, in fact, a communal construct crafted in a series of movements out into a shared social world Poetry here organizes and signals certain emotions through a kind of suggestive shorthand Its quotability and reiteration, its capacity to refer to and work for varieties of occasions and individuals, to evoke without overly specifying, make it invaluable to the novel’s project of representing and inserting itself into a recognized cultural field Such a scene also tells its readers what to with poetry: together the quoted lines and the novelistic frame suggest that poetry (and perhaps all “serious literature”) represents and works through heightened emotional moments Of course Orlando does not simply recollect and repeat poetic lines at moments of heightened emotion Like any romantic hero worth his salt, he also composes his own poems Such poems register and express the passions of the moment: sensations “so much under the influence of fancy” which 130 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008