This other reading emerges when one reflects on the strange interplay in the sonnet between images of presence and absence. Baum appears to have registered a related incongruity when he noted a “chronological” ambiguity in the poem as it figures in sequence: “as a sonnet of wooing, [it] should precede those of surrender” (see Baum, , 89 ). Another related problem arises from the discrepancy between the date of composition—February, 1870—and the subject matter: DGR and Jane Morris were not together in February 1870, and yet it is generally accepted that the poem was written with her in mind.

These evidences suggest that the sonnet, like so many in the sequence, “has an abstract side”, as DGR wrote in his letter to Alice Boyd. In this frame of reference we would read “Nowhere but here she is” (4) and “As here . . . we sit” (12) in a psychological rather than a realistic sense. This reading would “see” the poet's beloved as a figure in his imagination, as a fantasy image (or perhaps an artistic image—a drawing or a painting) that comes to him when he lives in “Love's spell” (4). So when the sonnet says that “the words take wing from” (11) his beloved's “love-lines”, we have an excellent example of DGR's worked language: for these texts serve as second-order figures whose principal reference is this very sonnet, its own lines and words; for it is this poem, as it is the picture of the beloved in , that embodies the beloved. (In DGR's argument throughout , only an aesthetic form can begin to approach, or hope to express (however inadequately), the true and ideal beauty of the beloved, or the love that she involves and instantiates.)

This reading also accommodates the sonnet to the sequence's crucial theme of the relation between love, art, and poetry. Finally, it articulates the ideality of the love that is being pursued, as well as constructed, in project.