Stein's excellent comments on the shifting and decorative character of the sonnet deserve the most careful consideration. He is certainly correct to say that a central subject of the sonnet is the problem of interpreting aesthetic works, and to argue that the problem emerges through the decorative approach DGR takes to his materials, including the various meanings that are suggested by the sonnet's sets of figurations. In this last respect the sonnet should be compared to the pair of
The sestet, as so often in DGR's sonnets, pivots the
whole into a self-reflexive condition: “this vase
” signals
this sonnet. But the identity of the “you
” (line 1) and
the “He
” (lines 2, 9)—standard markers for constructing
an interpretation according to a grammar of subjective or romantic expression—remains
indeterminate throughout. The distinctly impersonal cast that develops as a consequence supplies the sestet with its impressive and dark power. The vase's master—the artist, the individual person—would have destroyed the vase, so dreadful are its histories, had he not come to see the vase in such an impersonal way. According to the sonnet, the vase has been fated to serve—in the words of the sequence's
“a comparatively early performance”
in one instance, and in another dates it 1869 (see WMR,
Except for the title,the substantive text is stable from the printer's copy manuscript through all subsequent printings.
First printed (under the title
The octave recalls Keats's
He
” of the sonnet
was meant to signify Millais; Frederick Page suggested Keats, while Baum
thought it referred to DGR himself (see WMR,