Commentary
Introduction
Though regularly (and understandably) criticized for its
mannered Petrarchanism (
“too labored and artificial”
, in
Baum's phrasing:
The House of Life
, 77
), the sonnet appears to arrange
itself as an argument for the realization of an Ideal love experience. The
work makes an elaborate display of its artifices and allegorical forms, but
it uses them as indices of
“the superficial pleasures of love”
(
The House of Life
, 77
) and
“frivolous or
self-seeking views of love”
(see WMR,
DGR as Designer and Writer
, 189
).
In mounting its criticism of those impoverished forms of love, the sonnet
necessarily turns its own artificialities into signs of an imaginative
shortfall. Against such failures the sonnet sets up a momentary monument to
an alternative and higher order of imagination. This comes in the eleventh
line, upon which the entire sonnet is made to pivot. In a characteristic
Rossettian move, DGR works the word “unimagined”
so that it will
be taken to mean both “not imagined”
(i.e., real) and “beyond imagination”
(i.e., transcendental, Ideal). This exquisite
effect seems meant to recall, and replicate, the final line of
<xref doc="a.5-1869.raw">“Nuptial Sleep”</xref>
, when a similar
experience of a realized Ideal form is recorded.
Textual History: Composition
The date of composition is July 1869, as we know from the manuscript of the poem DGR sent in a letter to William
Bell Scott. Peattie gives the date “Before mid-autumn 1869” (see Peattie,
Letters of William Michael Rossetti
, 6
), and Baum follows Tisdel in the conjectural date of “?1853-1862” (see Baum,
The House of Life
, 77
).
Textual History: Revision
The text goes unrevised after its appearance in the 1870
<xref doc="a.1-1870.1stedn.rad" workcode="6-1869">Poems</xref>
, and only one substantive change was made earlier. Besides the copy sent to Scott, there is a later corrected copy in the Fitzwilliam composite
“House of Life”
manuscript.
Printing History
First printed in mid-August 1869 as part of the
Penkill Proofs, the
sonnet remained in all proof stages and was published in the 1870
<xref doc="a.1-1870.1stedn.rad" workcode="6-1869">Poems</xref>
and thereafter. It is
<xref doc="a.44-1869.raw">The House of Life</xref>
Sonnet VII in the
1870 volume, and
Sonnet VIII in 1881.
Literary
The sonnet is highly literary, working off the concettistic
manner of the Petrarchan tradition. The quasi-allegorical figures appearing
throughout the poem are generally treated as second-order images
of an imagination that is “anhungered of”
higher order realities.
Autobiographical
Line 13 seems to be an oblique reference to Elizabeth
Siddal's pale eyes, here seen as shadowed from their flat greenish blue
(which is how WMR described them: see WMR,
Memoir
I, 171
) into
grey. The shadowing is used throughout the sequence as a figura of death. (Jane Morris had dark eyes.)
Bibliographic
Baum, ed.,
<hi rend="i">The House of Life</hi>
, 77
WMR,
<hi rend="i">DGR as Designer and Writer</hi>
, 189-190