This collection is an early notebook containing DGR's fair copies of poems he
wrote before 1850, as the title page indicates. Most are sonnets that he and
his brother wrote as part of the game of bouts
rimés they used to play with each other to hone their
prosodic skills (see commentaries for bouts rimés
sonnets, the collection includes a handful of other early work.
The handwriting is uniform and distinctive, with the exception of the
cancelled fragment of text on page [48], which is scripted in a much later
hand. From other manuscript and proof materials we can see that DGR
recovered this notebook in 1868-1869 and used it as a resource for thinking
about his poetry at that time. He must have considered printing some of this
work in his 1870 Poems
Sonnets and other short
pieces, mostly written
before 1850
D G Rossetti.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti