This is a sonnet carefully built to represent nature in symbolical terms, with the symbols all being ambiguous. The octave carries a series of figurations whose primary value is related to springtime and to summertime as periods of pleasure and fertile growth. But every line is at the same time made to carry an undertone of something degenerative, and so carries a forecast of the dark topics raised in the sestet. The double-meanings begin with the ambiguous symbol of the cuckoo, the bird who flourishes as an emblem of spring by bringing death to the offspring of other birds. (In the following lines note for example the phrases “leaves it”, “visit”, “sunset”, “furtive flickering”, and “lusts”.) The sonnet is a more personal version of many texts in Swinburne, most famously, I suppose, the great chorus in Atalanta in Calydon
DGR finished the sonnet on 28 December 1879, and sent a
The sonnet is worked up from DGR's notebooks, which exhibit scraps of lines from the early 1870s. Ashley Library Note Book I has drafts of
First published in the 1881 Ballads and Sonnets
DGR Designer and Writer
House of Life