WMR and others accept a literal interpretation of the sonnet's central
distinction between an order of Time and and order of Eternity. But these
ideas may of course be read as dialectical tropes that come to signify a set
of purely mortal experiences—in which case the fulfilled hour of
love would represent a mortal and embodied engagement more perfect even than
a consummated union of lovers (“consummate
joys”
). It is crucial to see that this idea is being
entertained in the poem, for DGR's whole project depends upon imagining not
merely a higher order of spiritual
bliss (i.e., a more fleshly
order), but a higher order of fleshly bliss (i.e., a more spiritual order).
On each side of this traditional dichotomy, in DGR's view, lies a conceptual
and imaginative failure. Hence the ironic force of the
phrase “consummate joys”
in line 5
of this sonnet.
How we read the cryptic first line controls the remainder of the sonnet. The
line's difficulty is extreme if we take the sonnet as accepting the
unproblematic truth of the dichotomy time/eternity. If we do not, then
“The hour which might have been”
signifies the poet's awareness/belief not merely in the possibility of a
perfected mortal love, but of an hour when one would see and know that
perfection. In fact, the perfected hour seems to be defined in DGR's
imagination by a consciousness, as it were: an ecstatic love experience that
simultaneously transacts the whole of the sensuous body and the whole of the
aware mind. (One wants not to lose sight of the important detail that this
experience is imagined by DGR as an hour and not (say) a
moment: sonnets may be measured as moments, but love
is by hours, as the famous
hour”, furthermore, both
“might have been”and also
“might not be”, ever; both possibilities must be entertained.
Baum reads this poem as “a companion piece to the previous
sonnet
” (i.e., hour
” (Baum, The House of Life
Poems, Ballads, and Sonnets
“the series in
value”
(Caine, Recollections
DGR wrote the poem in August 1869, as the
The text as printed in the
First printed in the
“though clearly referring
to the Other Beloved [i.e., Jane Morris], might also seem to refer
to Rossetti's wife”
(Baum, The House of Life
It is of course impossible not to register the force that the dominant image would have had for DGR, whose daughter was stillborn to Elizabeth in May 1861. This reference connects the sonnet directly to
“hour”that is being imagined from a point of view that is not here enmeshed in the temporalities being discussed.