The syntactic ambiguity of the appositive construction in lines 5-6 locates
the dynamic of mutual desire in the sonnet: both
the Lady and Love are “creature[s] of poignant thirst/And
exquisite hunger
”, and the poet's figural recreations
signify his identity with them. By representing the dynamic in nuptial terms
DGR can introduce (the context is after all a Victorian one) the fleshly
terms in which the spiritual relations are imagined to be working themselves out.
Lines 7-8 are loosely biblical/religious: they recall Jesus' harrowing of
hell, the trumpet-call to the Last Judgment, perhaps even the climactic
moment of the crucifixion when Jesus gives up the ghost. In any case, they
introduce the idea (traditional and Christian) of a second birth; and as the
sestet argues, this new life is itself an evolving process that culminates
in “Death's nuptial change
”. The latter
may be read either literally—as a reference to the passage of the
married lovers to their final reward in heaven; or more figuratively, as an
argument about the spiritual inertia at work when two “become
one flesh”
.
In terms of
“Before mid-autumn
1869”
(Peattie, Letters of WIlliam Michael Rossetti
House of Life
DGR slightly altered the 1870
First printed in mid-August 1869 as part of the
The sonnet consciously adopts a courtly and even a“my Lady”
) and in its manner of
elaborating its complex conceits. DGR means to establish a general relation
to Dante's
The sonnet inaugurates the important image constellation of the grove and its associated motifs. For Petrarch's clear influence on this nexus of images see his
In contrast to the Bridal
” thought defines the Victorian
terms that govern DGR's work, and in particular
couch of death”.