Commentary
Introduction
A major focus of discussion of this sonnet is the “identity” of “the one Hope's one name”. Stein is acute to emphasize the written/scriptured
character of the One Hope. Following the iconographic terms that
constellate around the paradisal imagery (and in particular “some
sweet life-fountain”
), one inclines (after WMR) to read the One
Hope as the secret “name”
of the Ideal Beloved. Certainly
the last lines of the octave recall
<xref doc="a.1-1847.s244.raw">“The Blessed Damozel”</xref>
,
which is the opening poem in the 1870
<xref doc="a.1-1870.raw">Poems</xref>
. But Stein correctly
emphasizes the abstract and allegorical style DGR cultivates—a style
that effectively translates all the figural forms into tropes for an
aesthetic commitment to
“art as the key that unlocks the complex
secrets of existence”
(see Stein,
<hi rend="i">The Ritual of Interpretation</hi>
, 202
). In this perspective, DGR's important fragment
<xref doc="a.pr5240.f11.rad" from="240">“To Art”</xref>
is obviously pertinent.
DGR's comments on the sonnet to Alice Boyd reinforce Stein's view, for DGR insisted on its general symbolic significance: the sonnet “refers to. . .the
longing for accomplishment of individual desire after death”
(see
Fredeman,
<hi rend="i">Correspondence</hi>
, 70.63
, letter of 22 March 1870). His comment treats this transcendental belief as if it were an ideological fact to be handled in an objective (that is to say, in an aesthetic) fashion. (See the commentaries on the
<xref doc="a.9-1848.s40.raw">“Mary's Girlhood”</xref>
sonnets and the pair of
<xref doc="a.3-1868.raw">“Newborn Death”</xref> sonnets.).
That DGR liked the sonnet is clear from what he wrote to Hall Caine: that “It is fully
equal to the very best of my sonnets, or I should not have wound up the
series with it”
(see Caine,
<hi rend="i">Recollections</hi>
, 249
).
Textual History: Composition
Added to the 1870 sequence of
<xref doc="a.44-1869.raw" workcode="16-1870">The House of Life</xref>
at the very end of the proof process (in March 1870), the
sonnet was almost certainly written at that time. DGR sent >a copy in a letter to Swinburne in the spring of 1870, just before his 1870 volume was printed. Another fair copy (the printer's copy) is preserved in the same collection of manuscripts that has these two documents.
Textual History: Revision
DGR made a small but signal change in line 12 in
the 1881 text (he substituted “alien”
for
“written”
). In the second edition he also altered the text of the first line to the received text—which had been the original text, but which DGR altered at the last moment of the proof process for the first edition because he thought the reading followed a famous passage in Petrarch too closely (see his letter to WMR, 25 March 1870,
Fredeman,
<hi rend="i">Correspondence</hi>
, 70. 71
: “I've been rather worried by your discovery about the resemblance to Petrarch's first Sonnet which I verily believe I never read. Would you mind copying it for me?”).
Printing History
First printed around 1 March 1870 as part of the
Proofs
for the first edition of the 1870
<xref doc="a.1-1870.raw">Poems</xref>
. This is
one of the
“three new sonnets in the last set of proofs”
that he mentions in his letter to Alice Boyd of 15 March 1870
(
<hi rend="i">Letters</hi>
II. 817
). It is
<xref doc="a.44-1869.raw">The
House of Life</xref>
Sonnet L in the
1870 volume,
and Sonnet CI in 1881.
Autobiographical
The longing for the “one name
” of the
“one Hope
” can scarcely not recall DGR's involvement with
his several loves, most especially his wife and Jane Morris, but also with
Fanny Cornforth and perhaps several of his models as well. Commentators who focus on the autobiographical dimension of the sonnet and the sequence as a whole usually identify this “one name
” with Mrs. Morris. But if autobiography is insisted upon, a plausible case could be made for the name of DGR's dead wife. The key point, however, is that the “one name” is problematic exactly because in real human time, it multiplied.
Bibliographic
Baum, ed.,
<hi rend="i">The House of Life</hi>
, 223-225
Caine,
<hi rend="i">Recollections</hi>
, 249
Lindberg,
<xref doc="a.victnews.002.rad" link="dead" from="20" workcode="16-1870" to="21">“Rossetti's Cumaean Oracle”</xref>
(1962), 20-21
Rees,
<hi rend="i">The Poetry of DGR</hi>.
, 123-124
WMR,
<hi rend="i">DGR as Designer and Writer</hi>
, 260-262
Stein,
<hi rend="i">The Ritual of Interpretation</hi>
, 202-203