Willowwood

title  See WMR's note (1911)

5  The reference is surely to the song of Love that will be given in the third sonnet of Willowwood; and, more generally, to the messages Of Life, Love, and Death that are born along the practice of art and poetry.

11  spring: this is a revision from the first reading, “lymph” (meaning “pure water”). The change allows DGR to work the word “spring” so that we hear the phrase “swept the string” in “swept the spring”. This wordplay recalls lines 4-5 in this sonnet and anticipates the “song” of Love that will emerge in the following sonnets. It scarcely needs pointing out that DGR conceals the word “wept” in the phrase—a kind of word-play that he deploys frequently.

3  Both Baum and WMR comment on the line; in each case their readings understand the line to refer to souls that have yet to be reborn.

4  new birthday: the phrase glances back to the motif that is announced in Bridal Birth and that climaxes in the Newborn Death sonnets.

3  See WMR's note (1911). Typically in the sonnets of The House of Life DGR will construct one or at the most two textual moments where an autobiographical reading presses itself with special force. Line 3 in this sonnet is such a moment. Widowhood: the term is freighted with autobiographical overtones, though DGR clearly offers it as a metaphor. The line as a whole is extravagant and artificial to a degree; it appears to signal, in simple terms, a sense of loss that strikes to the deepest levels of the soul.

4  lifelong night: the word suggests the poet's newly discovered awareness that love as a desire for perfection is necessarily a dark night of the soul for the mortal lover.

6  This “last hope lost” distinctly recalls the motto written above the entrance to hell in Dante's Inferno. It also calls forward to the concluding sonnet of the sequence, The One Hope.

7  The “unforgotten food” signals at one level the kisses he is deprived of. It is difficult not to register as well a eucharistic reference.

10  tear-spurge, blood-wort: these are linguistic inventions constructed from a pair of plant names that DGR clearly found suggestive for their sound. That the actual plants (spurge and wort) are poisonous is helpful to the effect DGR wants. Talon aptly calls attention to the proto-surrealist character of these images (see Talon, 42 ).

11-12  WMR was the first to point out that DGR is here using the Adventist doctrine of Soul-Sleep as a vehicle for his thought. This idea “that the human soul remains, after the death of the body, in a state of suspended animation, awaiting . . . the Day of Judgment” ( DGR as Designer and Writer, 217n ) figures prominently in the poetry of DGR's sister.

1  meeting rose and rose: the enjambed placement of these words encourages a brief uncertainty of meaning (we can't tell the parts of speech of the principal words until we gain the closure of line 2). This kind of poetic effect is common in DGR as it is in his master Blake. The ephemeral meaning—which suggests a meeting that rises and rises, either again and again or higher and higher—can never be dismissed from one's attention once it is realized because it fulfills so many of the desires and expectations raised in the previous three sonnets.

6  Compare Love's Lovers, line 6. The autobiographical moment comes at the end of the octave (6-8); as (almost) always, these lines may refer as well to Elizabeth Siddal or to Jane Morris.

7  The presence of The Romance of the Rose is perhaps most directly felt in this final sonnet: the "grey eyes" echoes Guillaume de Lorris' reference to the dying Narcissus (lines 1571-1574), while the rose references follow the medieval work's textual alteration of Ovid's Metamorphoses, where the final flower is of course the narcissus.