The military tropes organize the argument, which in brief terms constructs an imagination of a defeated army; of a dispirited and captured soldier; and finally (in the sestet) of a call to resistance, inspired by a memory of past heroic passion. This constellation of images mixes with a more literal set, where the poet is speaking of a day and a (forthcoming) night when his lady and he will be separated from each other.
The additional conceits introduced in the
sestet complicate the sonnet even more. They are important, however,
for two reasons: first, the “passionate portraitures”
remind us that it is the artist/poet himself, and his aesthetic acts, that
inspirit (and inspire); and second, the call they make is a call
to suffering, for a life in Love is a life lived in terms of
interminable desire (“wild will”
).
Written at Penkill in August 1869; he
sent a copy of the poem to Ford Madox Brown in a letter of 26
August (see too violent. Do you think so?
It occurs to me to say ‘
”
(see And thy feet stir not, and thy body
endures.
’ Do you like this better? It conveys the sense of impotent
retention, which is wanted, but that is already conveyed in line 7.“very fine”
as it stood (
The
The text first printed in September 1869 in the
The conceit of the “passionate portraitures”
has a literal meaning—i.e., one is asked to think of actual
pictures of the face of the poet's lady, for the poet is also an
artist. But the phrase signals as well this poet's
committment to think (and act) in terms of images in general.
First printed in September 1869 as part of the
DGR's splendid parody of this sonnet,
The autobiographical references in the poem are by no
means unambiguous. In one perspective the sonnet may reflect
on DGR's sense of loneliness in being
separated from Jane Morris. This is how Doughty reads the poem, and in that
reading the “passionate portraitures”
(line 11) refer to
DGR's pictorial representations of her. But that phrase might as
well refer to his pictures of his wife, or even to her own paintings and drawings.
This basic ambiguity underscores the third reading, where the reference is not
to any particular person, but to the particular dream-vision of which they
may all be taken as instatiations.