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The exposé proposes to examine conversation in Woolf’s works as an ebb and flow which is audible as recitative in the ‘sea’ novels: To the Lighthouse, The Waves and The Voyage Out and might be read as an undercurrent of continuity which is a metaphor of the mother’s voice. Through close reading of various extracts we analyse this recitative in terms of a poetics of refrain and anaphora giving rise to a rythmic anteriority which silences prose in a way Virginia Woolf herself recognised as proper to both the poetic per se and to the sea. This poetics is often based on a character’s reminiscence of words spoken, as words recalled and repeated in states of semi-consciousness—after dinner, before sleep—recover the intensity of their acoustic and visual potential, silencing semantics. Conversation in this sense is linked not so much to the spoken, as to orality, prosody, what G. M. Hopkins called ‘the record of speech in writing’.