This extremely artificial piece was one of the last sonnets added to the sequence for the 1870 volume. If it were not part of the sequence of
“Before April 1870”
(WMR, Classified Lists
“sheet”
of work he had written
at Scalands (see DGR's letter to Alice Boyd, 15 March 1870: Letters
The only surviving manuscript is not holograph but
This is one of the last sonnets added to the sequence for the 1870
Baum rightly notes (and criticizes) the Marinistic
character of this sonnet: “Petrarchanism drawn out to the most
extreme state
” (see Baum, The House of Life
The letter of the poem is surely related to one of Jane Morris's
love letters to DGR—and may in fact be one that she wrote to DGR
in March 1870, before she joined him for a brief visit at Scalands, the home of
Barbara Bodichon (near Hastings). Her intimate correspondence with
DGR has not survived, and we have only a truncated
number of DGR's letters to her: see
The House of Life. A Sonnet-Sequence, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The Trial Book Fallacy
DGR as Designer and Writer.