Both WMR and Baum focus attention on paraphrasing the sonnet, which to Baum exhibits “a perplexing looseness of . . . sentence structure”. Both seem to take the elaborate figuration at face (that is to say, psycho-biographical) value when they might well have noted, what seems obvious, that the sonnet is a kind of allegorical presentation of DGR's compositional method. In that sense the poem is indeed very personal. The sonnet glosses the visionary perplexities that continually emerge and metastasize through the sequence, as DGR re-thinks his poems by re-writing them or re-organizing them, thus generating a perpetually shifting set of perspectives.
Five integral manuscripts of the sonnet survive: a
First published in the 1881 Ballads and Sonnets
DGR Designer and Writer
House of Life