Commentary
Introduction
The poem is a companion piece to
Last Fire
, one of the
so-called Kelmscott love sonnets DGR wrote in the summer of 1871. The poem was
written to be included in an expanded version of
The House of Life
, as the
Troxell manuscript shows,
but its erotic frankness almost certainly led DGR to keep the poem back. Buchanan's
notorious review attacking DGR's “fleshly”
poetry, published in
the fall of 1871, appeared only a few months after this sonnet was written, and
caused DGR to remove
Nuptial Sleep
from his next edition of the sonnet sequence. If anything, “First Fire” would have seemed to
Buchanan an even more outrageous work.
Though neither this sonnet nor its companion
“Last Fire” appear among the Kelmscott love sonnets, but the stubs in that book indicate that they must originally have been written there. The fair copy in the Ashley collection is almost certainly the text that was in that book.
Textual History: Composition
Doughty (688n) dates this work 1869, but the manuscript in the
Troxell Collection at Princeton indicates 1871 as the date of this work.
Textual History: Revision
DGR did not revise this poem for publication,
but the surviving documents show alternate readings at different points.
Printing History
First published in 1960 by
Doughty,
Victorian Romantic
, 400-401
.
Autobiographical
Like the other erotic sonnets in
The House of Life
, this sonnet is a record of
DGR's relations with Jane Morris.
Bibliographic
Wise,
The Ashley Library
, IX. 115-116
Doughty
400-401, 688n