Differing interpretations of the sequence as a whole
focus their differences in this central group. The issue is usually
represented as a problem about love and the hope of its fulfillment. Formally,
of course, these sonnets (like the sequence as a whole) conclude with benediction
(
aureole, in
My own view of the matter is that both readings are in a sense correct: that is to say, the poetic argument insists upon a benediction and a promised hope, but the poet (and the poetry) gain no emotional resolution from these committments. On the contrary, the committments exacerbate the experience of suffering. But it appears to be DGR's purpose to argue that the benediction and the pain of love are dialectically related to each other. This argument is clearly made in
The
Rossetti
Papers 1862 to 1870
The surviving manuscripts show that DGR worked out the all-but final state of the sonnets in his manuscript revision process. Considered line by line, the final manuscript version achieved in early 1869 exhibits only some minor further changes in the printed texts. But the sonnets underwent a highly significant structural revision when DGR was preparing them for eventual publication in the 1870
See below, the commentaries for the individual sonnets.
When he read them just after they were composed, about the finest thing he has done
”
(see WMR, Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870
The sonnets construct a highly detailed, as well as
a highly idiosyncratic, visionary place. Willowwood is a grove, with a pool or fountain, sacred
to those who have loved and lost and cannot forget
” (see Baum, Poems, Ballads, and Sonnets
First printed as Sonnets I-IV in the initial
One can scarcely resist the association of these sonnets with the painting
The most important literary context for these sonnets is the Narcissus story as retailed through Ovid's
While DGR recurs to the Narcissus story, this central treatment distinctly recalls the first appearance of the Ovidian scene in DGR's works. It comes in
These sonnets represent Love as Dante does in the
These sonnets appear to refer to DGR's beloved, but
the text does not specify clearly whether the person is DGR's wife or
whether it is Jane Morris. Most readers follow Two gazed into a pool, he gazed
and she,/ Not hand in hand, yet heart in heart, I think
”
Poetry of DGR
“to tell”, they come in the form of a
“song”, that is, as art.) The
“certain secret thing”that Love will sing into existence itself turns figural, like the entirety of the overarching dream structure. All the elements of the signifying system, including the referents it may suggest, are thereby idealized as deliberated imaginative constructions. The sonnets of DGR's sequence thus become signs themselves that are incorporate with an ideal and apparently limitless signifying system.
The underlying dynamic is perpetual erotic desire, which the sonnets are composed to represent and celebrate. Because loss appears an essential feature of the dynamic itself, the sonnets develop a structure of internal contradictions. It will be a perpetual obligation of the sequence to re-experience its structure of losses. In this sonnet, loss, desire, and art all come before us as, literally, conscious ideals: images that are waking dreams.
DGR's own comment on the sonnet is notable: “The
sonnet describes a dream or trance of divided love momentarily re-united
by the longing fancy; and in the imagery of the dream, the face
of the beloved rises through deep waters to kiss
the lover”
(
Of the four
Two manuscripts survive: a
The scene picturing the sonnet's speaker and Love seated together at a well anticipates the scene DGR painted in the background of
More crucially, it also recalls his watercolor done for Ruskin,
In negotiating this sonnet, then, one wants to realize, first, that while the sonnet comes before the actual song of Love in
mournful formsof this sonnet have been called up, half-resurrected as it were, by the song that Love sings. At once witness and participant in this visionary scene, the poet is therefore also the mouthpiece, if not the agent, of Love.
Some local prose explications are not out of order. Lines 1-4 introduce the image of souls suspended in a life-in-death that can be imagined either in neo-platonic terms (transmigration of souls) or in Christian Adventist terms (soul-sleep). These figures then mutate into a second set of images (lines 5-8): the song of love is not so much like death-suspended souls as like a group of lovers who are defined as “shades” by their regret for the pastness of their happy days. The “souls” (line 3) are (literally) different from the “shades” (line 8); both are in fact tropes, or textual constructions (images/phantasms), for the “certain secret” (
Line 13 presents a very difficult problem. WMR says that the quotation should be read: “For this once only do we yield”, while Baum suggests that it might mean “Only once did we yield, i.e., the ‘one hour‘ of XL”. But these readings are not at all compelling, and other readings are clearly possible. It is not at all certain, for example, whether the quotation is to be imagined as coming from “them” or “us” (see line 9); or whether the “all” of line 12 includes both. “All” suggests that the source of the words is either “them” or “them” and “us” (but not just “us”, i.e., not just the poet in his trance-embrace with his beloved's dream-image). Moreover, the quotation may well be taken to suggest a meaning such as: “at last we have found a way to be alone together”. Finally, the repetition of the phrase “for once” introduces an evident ambiguity—indeed, an enacted contradiction— into the statement.
One wants to understand that these prosings
of DGR's sonnets are not to be taken as interpretations of encrypted
meanings. That is, prose translations of this kind which have been a
part of DGR criticism from the beginning
are best taken as technical
devices
for clarifying the structural relations of the verse components. They
help to define the reading options, as it were, that DGR has laid down in the
labyrinths of his texts. Dante's prose explanations of the parts of his
poems, which he regularly sets out in the
DGR's preoccupation with the doppelgänger, epitomized in his drawing
Two manuscripts survive: a
Alas that those who are condemned to wander here cannot die” (
if”, line 11) that the soul might never leave Willowwood: that it might sleep there forever in a kind of life-in-death (line 12), or that it might wander there forever in a kind of death-in-life (line 14). Love's song is a prayer against those possibilities, not because Love would imagine some permanent escape from Willowwood, but because Love desires a world where Willowwood is a locality (or what Blake would have called a “State”).
In DGR's argument—as the octave shows—
the experience of Willowwood is a kind of dark night of the soul where
deprivation is the condition and even the sign of the light
that is desired. The linguistic repetitions are rhetorical figures of
the presence of Eros, and signs that there will be a second coming,
as it were, of the light (“again . . . again shall see
”, lines
5, 8).
Three manuscripts survive: a lightly revised
Of all the sonnets in the
The sestet has two especially volatile and interesting passages. The syntax of line 11 is left ambiguous because of the grammatical organization of the main clause: the primary sense of lines 9-11 inclines one to relate line 11 to the “long draught”, but the rules of grammar incline one to relate it to “the water where she sank”. The ambiguity is encouraged because each option shares a common term (“water”). A second uncertainty hovers around the phrase “both our heads” (line 14): in this case we may read the heads as eitherthe poet and Love, and/or as the poet and his beloved.
Four manuscripts survive: a heavily revised
“lymph”(meaning
“pure water”). The change allows DGR to work the word
“spring”so that we hear the phrase
“swept the string”in
“swept the spring”. This wordplay recalls lines 4-5 in this sonnet and anticipates the
“song”of Love that will emerge in the following sonnets. It scarcely needs pointing out that DGR conceals the word “wept” in the phrase—a kind of word-play that he deploys frequently.
“last hope lost”distinctly recalls the motto written above the entrance to hell in Dante's
“unforgotten food”signals at one level the kisses he is deprived of. It is difficult not to register as well a eucharistic reference.
“that the human soul remains, after the death of the body, in a state of suspended animation, awaiting . . . the Day of Judgment”(