PHRASAL VERBS IN THE FICTION OF VIRGINIA WOOLF: THE WAVES
1.- To draw out :
Meaning: to move out of a place
Text: “…the wave paused and then DREW OUT again “
USE: from interior to exterior
2.- To tear away:
Meaning: to remove (oneself, for example) unwillingly
Text: ” and the air seemed to become fibrous and to TEAR AWAY “
USE: removal (towards absence)
3. To rub out:
Meaning: to remove with a rubber something written or drawn in pencil
Text: “... until the dark stripes were almost RUBBED OUT ”
USE: disappearance, elimination, metaphorical
As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then DREW OUT again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flats bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to TEAR AWAY from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost RUBBED OUT. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.
The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf tranparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue fingerprint of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside