Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

The sonnet culminates (though it does not close)
the sequence in The House of Life that began with “Life-in-Love”. Perhaps
the central dramatic unit in the sequence, it details the erotic tension
that develops when the poet, like Dante before him, is
forced to negotiate the conflicting claims of Love. This conflict
is (philosophically) the ancient Platonic
dialectic between “memory [and] desire” (see e.g., “Supreme
Surrender” line 10); for DGR it is played out in his dual love
for Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris.

This poem is especially interesting in the way it
uses the octave's image of a process of writing as a prophetic
figure for doubled and changed meanings (in both art and life). The image
of the mother listening for her child's second cry turns in the
context of the sequence to an image of doubled meanings, new lives, new
loves. So this very sonnet, originally written in 1852 in circumstances that had nothing to do with
The House of Life, turns itself over to whole new ranges of significance when
it discovers, as it were, a new context in 1869-1870; and the context,
as well as the meanings, shift yet again when the sequence is
reconstructed in 1881. But whatever changes develop, in 1870 the essential
form of the dynamic of change is fully articulated.

The sonnet focuses the change as the difference between
a “song” with
“sweet music [and] tears”, on one hand, and a tormented
song on the other. One does not want to forget that, so far as art and
poetry is concerned, the difference is emotional, not (necessarily)
aesthetic. In a moral perspective, the difference is represented as
ambiguous (in DGR's sonnet sequence, the key figure of Death precisely locates this
moral ambiguity).

Textual History: Composition

Dated “Oct. 1852” by WMR (in Peattie, Letters of William Michael Rossetti
7), although he had earlier dated it 1869. Fredeman (
“Rossetti's ‘In Memoriam’”
) and Baum (
The House of Life
) ignore WMR's amended date; but it is unlikely WMR would have made such a change
if he didn't have clear evidence of its factualness. The 1852 date is supported by DGR, who appended the October 1852 date to his early fair copy now
in the Huntington Library. Charles Fairfax Murray's fair copy is in the Fitzwilliam composite “House of Life” manuscript.

Textual History: Revision

The text of the poem as published in the Fortnightly Review in March
1869 does not change in any substantive way in any of its later printings.

Literary

WMR commented on the octave as an accurate record of
DGR's process of composition (see WMR,
DGR as Designer and Writer
214
). But here DGR is arguing
that “now” his process of writing is riven by pain and torment.

Autobiographical

The October 1852 composition date underscores the
strong autobiographical character of the sonnet. Read in the context of 1869, DGR would have been translating the sestet of the sonnet as referencing his memories of his dead wife, and the poem would emerge as a description of the effect those memories have upon his immediate circumstances— notably, on his relations with
Jane Morris, the Innominata of the sequence.