This is an important sonnet for understanding several of the most essential features of
Second, the sonnet constructs a startlingly paradoxical argument in the
sestet. The general form of the argument is important, its “if/then”
structure: if I were no longer to see love's images and shadows on earth,
then how would I be able to hear the sounds of the dying year? “introduce[s] the motif of Despair ”
into the sequence (see Baum, Poems, Ballads, and Sonnets
form of the proposition
urges one to expect a very different thought: if I can
no longer see the images of love in the world, then what unhope would be
available to me any longer? The strong
allusion to Shelley argues that DGR is no more expressing a thought of despair
in this sonnet than Shelley is in
Knowledge-through-images and shadows is a knowledge that shifts and
changes its forms, and that operates in a dialectic of firm uncertainties, as
it were. So the sonnet concludes by staring at words like Hope and Death
in the realization that their affective value—which is to say, for DGR, their
love-value—must shift and change
Tisdel dates the poem ?1853-62, which Baum follows, but
it was almost certainly written between March and August 1869, which
is the date assigned to it by WMR and Fredeman (see Peattie, Letters of WIlliam Michael Rossetti
The only manuscript seems to be the
DGR made some slight changes to the poem when he first
printed it in August 1869 in the
First printed in mid-August 1869 as part of the
The Dante allusion in the octave operates not so much cognitively as apparitionally—which seems appropriate enough in the context of a work that argues by images. In the sestet DGR finishes his sonnet with a clear general allusion to Shelley: the most relevant text is of course the
The House of Life
DGR: The House of Life
DGR as Designer and Writer
“spirits”(which reside, respectively, in the heart, the brain, and the stomach; see Dante's