The Soul's Sphere

The images of moon and sun that open the sonnet resonate with key figurations in all of DGR's work. The lines distinctly echo the situation dramatized early in “The Blessed Damozel” and recovered throughout the “House of Life” sequence in sonnets that depict both Beloved and Innominata as a love-moon and the lover (or the poet) as the sun/son.

DGR worked at the poem in his notebooks. Ashley Library Note Book I has a draft of lines 13-14 and Note Book II has a draft of lines 1-3. The texts drafted in the Duke Library notebooks are: in Note Book II, lines 1-3, 12-14; in Note Book III, lines 12-14; and Note Book IV lines 6-7. The earliest complete text seems to be the Bancroft corrected copy. Two fair copies survive, one in the Fitzwilliam composite “House of Life” sequence, the other in the Library of Congress.

First published in the 1881 Ballads and Sonnets and collected thereafter.