The enigmatic character of the poem is a function of its serial movement into increasingly fantasmagorical figures. The initial symbolic construction, a recurrent Rosettian figuration, is fairly accessible, if also decidedly subjective. The second stanza's trope is more allegorical and attenuated, however, since the connection between the gold and the stream must be extra-textually defined by the reader. (One thinks, perhaps, of the symbolism in the Niebelungenlied
It is important to observe that the poem flaunts its constructed and artificial manner. This is not a poem asking to be read as a piece of first-person Romantic self-expression. It is, rather, a “lyric” in the sense DGR meant when he placed it in the Ballads and Sonnets
The only known manuscript is the
First published in the 1881 Ballads and Sonnets