Commentary
Introduction
Whatever the point of this sonnet when DGR wrote it in
1854, in 1869 and thereafter he appropriated it to
<xref doc="a.44-1869.raw">
<hi rend="i">The House of Life</hi>
</xref>
project.
It comes in as part of the sequence that begins, in the 1881 version of the work, with
<xref doc="a.2-1873.raw">“Transfigured Life”</xref>
. DGR forces it into a clear relation to the crucial
<xref doc="a.14-1869.raw">Willowwood</xref>
sequence—, the four sonnets that set the
entire work in train. The “woodside well”
of the latter group is the type of which “the foolish well”
of this sonnet is the antitype (to borrow Christian exegetical terms that are quite
relevant to DGR's secular poetry).
In a way that anticipates surrealist procedures,
DGR here is implicitly arguing that an early actual event forecasts a later
traumatic experience (the dream-experience of
<xref doc="a.14-1869.raw">Willowwood</xref>
).
The latter is taken in two ways: first, as an explication of
the hidden significance of the earlier event; second, as a promise that
what once was lost will in future be found again.
DGR borrowed from Dante the idea that poetical work
can carry meanings that are concealed at the time of the composition of
the poem, but that later events may expose, so that the poem can be
in effect re-written later by simply placing the old poem in the
context that was only implicitly present in the earlier circumstances. The
entire procedure of the
<xref doc="a.dante005.rad" link="dead">
<hi rend="i">Vita Nuova</hi>
</xref>
is governed by this kind of retrospective deployment
of earlier compositions.
Textual History: Composition
The composition date of 1854 comes from the personal notes
of Frederick Page, an editor at Oxford University Press who worked on
DGR and who shared his work with Baum (see Baum,
<hi rend="i">The House of Life</hi>
,
viii,
167
).
Doughty dates it, more exactly, October 1854 because he had seen the
manuscript now in the Huntington Library, where it bears that date in DGR's
autograph. The only other manuscript is the corrected copy in the Fitzwilliam composite
“House of Life”
sequence.
Textual History: Revision
When DGR came to publish the poem in 1869 he altered
the earlier text. All the published versions are substantively identical. Baum observes that “In an earlier [manuscript] version lines 6, 7
preserved the b rime”
(see Baum,
<hi rend="i">The House of Life</hi>
168
).
Printing History
First printed as sonnet X in the
sequence of sixteen sonnets published in the
<xref doc="a.ap4.f7.5.rad" workcode="3-1854">
<hi rend="i">Fortnightly Review</hi>
</xref>
in March 1869. It was then printed in mid-August 1869 as part of
the Penkill Proofs and
remained in all proof stages until it was published in the 1870
<xref doc="a.1-1870.1stedn.rad" workcode="3-1854">Poems</xref>
and thereafter. It is
<xref doc="a.44-1869.raw">The House of Life</xref>
Sonnet XXXI in the
1870 volume, and Sonnet
LXVII in 1881.
Literary
Baum is shrewd to register the “conversational
key, somewhat à la Browning, under whose
influence Rossetti occasionally wrote in his earlier years
” (
<hi rend="i">The House of Life</hi>
, 168
).
The Dantean figure of the pilgrim-poet, which functions
throughout DGR's sequence, is here more explicitly present.
Autobiographical
Baum suggests that the sonnet might be read as a comment
about DGR's “hesitation between painting and poetry as a
career
” (
<hi rend="i">Poems, Ballads, and Sonnets</hi>
, 303n
). But Doughty reads it more
intimately still, as a reflection on a “tardy but sincere love for some
humble person whose affection he has abused and betrayed in his
expectation of a sincere passion for some more exalted lover who will
appear in due time”
(Doughty,
<hi rend="i">A Victorian Romantic</hi>
, 154
). This reading folds
into Doughty's general thesis about DGR's love for Jane Morris. One need not
assent to its literal accuracy in order to see that this reading
can be applied to the sonnet and to DGR's work in various ways.
Bibliographic
Baum, ed.,
<hi rend="i">The House of Life</hi>
, 167-168
Doughty,
<hi rend="i">A Victorian Romantic</hi>
, 153-154
WMR,
<hi rend="i">DGR as Designer and Writer</hi>
, 230-231
Wagner,
<hi rend="i">A Moment's Monument</hi>
, 143