The sonnet's point is closely tied into the structure of
apparent” to the poet's gazing thought, the Lady is the central point of a meditation on Love, and especially on the drama of Love that gets recapitulated in the sequence. The clear autobiographical significance of the sonnet, notably in the sestet, underscores its structural (or narrative) function. Considered as an integral sonnet, it is not especially compelling.
“motif”
with lines 19-21 of kiss
” that
“slake[s]. . .the thirst of memory
”.
“Before April
1870”
(see Peattie, Letters of William Michael Rossetti
“?1869-70”
. The poem was certainly
written by early October 1869, since it is printed in the
Five manuscripts of the poem survive: two are at Princeton (both titled
“Sovereign Service”), a
The sonnet was not much altered from its first constitution in the harvest-field
” for
“fallowfield
”) has been generally
deplored.
The sonnet was first printed in the
The octave is dominated by images and machinery taken over from stil novisti
The sestet's reference to the “one shorn
tress”
of hair focuses the autobiographical subtext.
This is the lock of hair from his dead wife Elizabeth that was so cherished
by DGR (see his letter to his sister of 4 August 1852: My Story
“abandoned hair”
of another lady,
Jane Morris in fact, who is the beloved “so long afar, at
length so nigh”
. DGR met and was attracted to her in
1857, but his committment to Elizabeth, and William Morris's love for Jane,
intercepted their relations. By 1867 a serious intimacy was begun, however,
and this sonnet appears to record the consummation of that intimacy.
Nonetheless, the consummation may be read in relation to the
“Beloved” of the sonnet sequence rather than the
“Innominata”, and in narrative terms this would indeed
be the preferred reading.
The House of Life
DGR as Designer and Writer
DGR: A Record and a Study.