My9s
Creative Commons License
This exhibit has not been peer reviewed.  [Return to Group]  [Printer-friendly Page] 

The Moment and Monument of Two Rossetti Sonnets

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

Ryerson University, Department of English

Endnotes

1 A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter--that is, in lines of ten syllables each, in which the dominant rhythm is patterned on five weak/strong stresses. A sonnet's organization determines its "argument." The Shakespearean or English sonnet works out its tensions, statements, counter-statements, and resolutions, over 3 quatrains and a couplet (abab cdcd efef gg). A Petrarchan or Italian sonnet develops its arguments in two parts: an octave of two quatrains (abbaabba) and a sestet (the rhyme scheme in these six lines varies, but cdcdcd is typical). Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti generally wrote variants of the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet. DGR's "A Sonnet is a moment's monument" varies the sestet to include a couplet: cdcdee. CGR's "Sonnets are full of love" varies the octave organization so that the rhymes end abbababa; the sestet uses the rhyme pattern of cdeecd.

2 Christina Rossetti to William Rossetti, 20 June 1889, Letter 1665 in The Letters of Christina Rossetti: A Digital Edition.

3 William Michael Rossetti, "Bouts-Rimés," Pall Mall Gazette vol. 16 in Rossetti Archive. Although William doesn't mention this in the article, sister Christina was as avid and adept a bouts-rimés sonneteer as her brothers. See also Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 84-5.

4 Christina Rossetti to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, April 2, 1880, Letter 837 in The Letters of Christina Rossetti: A Digital Edition.

5 Christina sent Dante Gabriel the exact size manuscript for the illuminated sonnet. The verso of an extant draft design for "A Sonnet is a moment's monument" shows, in Christina's hand, "Size of Treasury of English Sonnets." See Rossetti Archive h

6 See Jerome. J. McGann's Commentary for "Introductory Sonnet" (A Sonnet is a moment's monument") for D.G. Rossetti's Ballads and Sonnets (1881) in the Rossetti Archive.

7 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Athens: Ohio UP, 2002), 65.

Links

Page 1

"Letter 1665" http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/crossetti/L1665

"Bouts-Rimés" http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/ap4.n12.16.rad#0.1.6

"Letter 837" http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/crossetti/L837

" Rossetti Archive " http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s258b.rap

"Jerome. J. McGann's Commentary for "Introductory Sonnet"" http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/1-1880.s258.raw