The title marks the sonnet explicitly in relation to what St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul”. In that respect its striking emotional ambivalences (for example, in lines 6-8) are exactly right.

“The work retrieved” is a phrase that anticipates the two sonnet triptychs that climax the sequence that began with : and . Both triptychs represent for DGR a (biographical) moment of clear-eyed understanding and emotional stability, before the onset of the troubles of what he calls here the “swift cycle” of his life. The phrase is especially telling because of the secret history recorded in this sonnet: that it dates from the late 1840s (as WMR indicates in his note on the Tinker manuscript). WMR gives an 1873 date to the poem in his 1911 edition, but the physical evidence clearly establishes the early date; WMR must have forgotten his own annotation 1n the Tinker manuscript.

More striking still, the sonnet is one of the bouts rimés sonnets that DGR composed with his brother in their earliest years as young poets learning their craft. See the text and commentary for , which is another of these early sonnets.