As so often in DGR's work, pastiche is the figure that dominates his style. The authority of the figure permeates every aspect of his art (both textual and pictorial), but it comes most to the fore in works like this one, which takes such a literal approach to historically removed conventions and materials.
Here the “image” named in line 1 reveals its character as soon as it begins to undergo its “Bewildering” (line 5) transformations. Ultimately it signifies art or any kind of imaginative construct; and a sonnet like this (or any work of art, it is here argued) is nothing more (or less) than a locus of image mutations that project a map of changing desire.
This sonnet, in the sequence, concludes the important series that opened with its paired sonnet
Apparently written on 2 May 1869, commemorating
the doleful anniversary of the delivery of a stillborn child to
Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti in 1861. Three copies are gathered in the Fitzwilliam composite
First printed in mid-August 1869 as part of the
The allegorical apparatus is a form of pastiche, one of the commonest of DGR's poetic devices. As in other pastiche texts (and pictures), it functions as a second-order set of figures: i.e., as an index or sign of a “dream” or fantasmal or imaginary order. Stylistically it has much in common with sonnets like
The
. This records the eighth
anniversary of the delivery of DGR's and Elizabeth's stillborn
daughter (the delivery was in fact on 2 May 1861). This event weaves its
way through many of the sonnets in
The House of Life
A Victorian Romantic
DGR as Designer and Writer
“a face sequestered and isolated from all other faces by depth of soul, speaking through the features (W.M.R.), or simply the face of one who is now a disembodied soul, isolated from mankind”(Baum,
Not memorable; not worthy of remembrance”, but it carries as well the obsolete meaning “
immemorial”, i.e., “
ancient beyond memory or record”. The play between these skewed meanings, especially in the context of the sonnet's ambiguously referenced memories, sharpens the poem's obscurities—like black laid upon black in a painting by Stella or Rothko.