Rossetti Archive Editorial Annotations

The Monochord

Basis text: Line numbering scheme for annotations keyed to Ballads and Sonnets Text.

Textual Notes:

title  The subtitle “(Written during Music)” was part of the title in 1870.

1  In 1870 the line read: “Is it the moved air or the moving sound”.

Glosses:

title  See WMR's note (1911) Monochord: probably with two meanings: 1. a musical instrument . . . with a single string; used for the mathematical determination of musical intervals; 2. a harmonious combination of sound. The OED marks the second as a medieval usage, obsolete in DGR's day.

2  draws: the word is a paradigm example of how DGR torques language for special meanings. In the 1881 placement of this poem in The House of Life, the sonnet follows immediately on the important pair “Soul's Beauty” and “Body's Beauty”. In each of those sonnets the word “draw” (or its cognates) clearly has graphic as well as psychological and physiological meanings. Those wordplays carry forward to this sonnet. See also line 12.

5  thunder-crown'd: “Three images in one: the sky piled with clouds, the roar of the ocean, the climax of the music” (Baum, The House of Life, 188n ).

9  this: most of all the word refers to the sonnet itself.

10  Exodus 13: 21.

12  See line 2.

13-14  The lines subtlely liken the poet's face to a sun, or a light source, which illuminates the darkness he sees before him.