Following the (auto)biographical inflection customary in his readings of
“The House of Life ” sonnets (and first laid down by
WMR), Baum sees the poem as DGR's present (first person) commentary on his
past (third person) self (Baum,
If we pose the question “whose feet?” we expose the sonnet's nuanced aesthetic references. The feet involve a parodic retelling of the scene in Genesis immediately after the fall, when the Lord God walks around paradise looking for Adam and Eve, who are hiding, ashamed of their sin. The feet are also the feet of Eros, the god of Love, who often appears walking up and down the gardens and rooms—the stanzas—of “The House of Life”. The feet of Eros are also regularly metrical feet throughout Rossetti's sonnet sequence. The feet are as well the feet of Orpheus, another of Rossetti's familiar spirits. They are the feet of Dante too, as we know from the clear reference that the phrase “this new Self” makes to the Dantean New Life. And so forth. That characteristically aquarian pronoun “He” summons them all to this sonnet moaning round with its many voices.
And what of that other aquarian pronoun “I”. The poem sets it in a state of such pure Borgesian uncertainty that we wonder if this is not a drama of psychic dismemberment. Of course it is, but that is the least of the matter. For the pronominal ambiguities emblemize not secrets deeply concealed and buried, but secrets flaunted, known, lived, exposed. Because there is no central Romantic self here, Romantic melancholy—Wordsworth's or Byron's—is both absent and beside the point. The tone is flat. Present instead are emblems of sorrow, a whole array of aesthetic objects that appear at once self-conscious and dreamlike.
Written specifically for
The title may also signal a poetic imagining of the intercourse of writer and
reader in the “field” of these sonnets. In this
perspective we observe DGR invoking a Horatian si vis me flere
I
” identifies. (The sestet's trope of
weeping moves dialectically against the octave's representation of a
“drear
” and
“lifeless
” scene.)
The poem was one of the last two written for and added to the 1870
The only manuscript is the fair copy made by Charles Fairfax Murray in the
Fitzwilliam composite
The text of the sonnet does not vary in its several printings.
First printed in a revise proof sheet (along with
Lines 5-8 may be read as a reflexive comment on the progress of
“one continual year”, difficult to understand precisely, gets clarified if read in a biographical framework: for