The key to the sonnet's peculiar force lies in the
loose suggestiveness DGR gives to the pronouns in the first five
lines. The principal reference of “thy”
and “thee”
and “thyself”
in lines 1, 3, and 5 is
the poet, just as the principal reference of “this lady”
and
“she
in lines 2-3 is the Innominata. Evoking as it does
the presence of the dead beloved, however, these pronouns begin to slip,
opening themselves to various other references. The process happens
as it were in reverse, and a key moment comes in line 5: here the
pronoun “her”
ought to specify the Innominata, but the
subject of dead and absent love is so dominant in the poem that one can
scarcely avoid reading it equally as referring to the dead beloved
(i.e., biographically, to the poet's wife). When this slippage begins to
function in the poem, all the pronominal references undergo
transformational pressures.
Furthermore, we cannot be certain that the octave
isn't referring to pictures—paintings and drawings—of
the loved persons. Line 5's “Look on thyself”
recalls line 14 of
“dead-drawn”. It is entirely to the point of
“life that vivifies”(line 3) is grounded in an interchange between acts of art and acts of love.
The Dantean presence that hovers over all of
“Donna della finestra”
The autobiographical elements in the sonnet are strong and unevadable. Considered from an aesthetic point of view, they serve to bring the erotic drama of the sequence into sharp focus for the reader. Indeed, that is the principal aesthetic function of all the autobiographical materials in the sequence.
The sonnet is clearly written to pair with the sonnet
“golden hair”in the sestet defines the sonnet's close intertextual relation with
“Before April 1870“
(see Peatti, Letters of William Michael Rossetti
The text as first set in type in the
The revisions in the Troxell MS are mostly in pencil and these were made sometime after the draft was first composed. But two are in ink (in lines 7 and 12) and these were made when the draft was produced. All of this work must have been done before the beginning of March 1870.
First printed around 1 March 1870 in the final
“three new sonnets in the last set of proofs”that he mentions in his letter to Alice Boyd of 22 March 1870 (see
In the context of
Donna della finestra”
“often”to seek her out, to ease his sorrow. After writing two sonnets to her, however, Dante reflects critically on his behavior:
“At length, by the constant sight of this lady, mine eyes began to be gladdened overmuch with her company; through which thing many times I had much unrest, and rebuked myself as a base person.”These reflections lead him to write another sonnet (
“The very bitter weeping that ye made”). This sonnet argues that the relationship between Dante and the
donna della finestra”
must not any way” function except to “
recall each ancient sign/Of grief, and her for whom your tears were shed“ (lines 7-8). This famous moment in the Dantean myth cannot fail to complicate the way we read DGR's sonnet.
Baum says of this sonnet that Here we meet for the
first time
”
(see Baum, unmistakably in the sequence the New Beloved. In
the previous sonnets the Lady might be assumed to be Elizabeth
Siddal Rossetti, though I doubt if the assumption is always warrantedThe House of Life
“refers to an actual love with a reminiscence of a former one”
(Correspondence
The sestet of the sonnet is recalling the exhumation of DGR's wife's
body in October 1869; DGR wanted to recover the manuscript volume of his
poems from the grave, as those were the only texts for a number of the poems
he was planning to publish in the 1870 volume. Baum's note is to the
point here: Rossetti was not present at the disinterring of the
manuscript in his wife's coffin, but it was reported to him that the hair
remained unchanged after the seven years' burial
” (Baum, The House of Life
DGR has a
“donna della finestra”
what I believe to lie at the heart of all true Dantesque commentary . . . is, the existence always of the actual events even where the allegorical superstructure has been raised by Dante himself”. That observation must always be taken into consideration when we read DGR's sonnet sequence as well, and not least of all in the case of this sonnet.
The House of Life
DGR and the Game that Must be Lost
passim
DGR as Designer and Writer
“my”and the substitution of the less definite “
thy, thy, this”. These changes turn the sonnet to that
“abstract side”that DGR mentioned as its distinctive quality in a letter of 22 March to Alice Boyd (see
draw”, particularly in relation to “
breath” and “
sighs”, in order to suggest the (literally) vital relation between life and art. See especially
so much” here: it might be imagined as either little or much, depending on how the octave is read.