Read as part of
“the ‘Day of Love’ [refers] to a meeting between lovers who have much to remember ”(see letter of 25 March 1870,
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
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
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
When DGR decided, around 26 February 1870, to reorganize the order of the sonnets in
“Two other new ones”, of which this was one (see letter to Swinburne, 26 February 1870,
The only manuscript is the
The text of the poem does not change from the form as first printed in the proofs for the 1870 volume.
First printed around 1 March 1870 as part of the
The poem seems to refer to some moment in DGR's relations with Jane Morris—perhaps to an incident when they were together in 1869, before she left England for medical treatments at Ems. In any case, despite the present tense of lines 12-14, the sonnet is a recollective text.
The House of Life
DGR as Designer and Writer