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The Moment and Monument of Two Rossetti Sonnets

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

Ryerson University, Department of English

Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
    Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
    One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart's quiet home,
    To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
    Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my loadstar while I go and come.
And so because you love me, and because
    I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath
    Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honoured name:
    In you not fourscore years can dim the flame
Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws
    Of time and change and mortal life and death.
The touch of the human hand in Dante Gabriel's illuminated "A Sonnet is  a moment's monument" and Christina's holograph copy of "Sonnets are full of love" emphasizes the personal nature of these poems as paratextual supplements to the "main" birthday gift of the Treasury of English Sonnets. While traces of their personal meanings in the gift of April 1880 may be ghostly presences in their subsequent published forms, each new setting brought its own expressiveness to these two sonnets. In its public location as the engraved frontispiece to William Sharp's biography, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study, published after the poet-artist's untimely death in 1882, the illuminated sonnet memorializes Dante Gabriel's verbal/visual aesthetic as the touchstone to his life and work As the unillustrated proem to D.G. Rossetti's sonnet sequence, The House of Life, in his Ballads and Sonnets collection of 1881, "A Sonnet is a moment's monument" comments on the work's main themes of erotic love in relation to death, time, and art. While these thematics are present in the illuminated sonnet "DG Rossetti pro Matre facit," the dominant meanings that emerge in this context are principally concerned with what humans can make out of a shared heritage, a common store of memory, and a recognition that we live and love with death ever in view. 
The meanings of Christina's "Sonnets are full of love" are also materially informed by its various contexts. In its first published form as the dedicatory poem to her mother for A Pageant and Other Poems, the reference to "this my tome /Has many sonnets" aptly refers to the book of her own verses that follows. However, in its holograph form as a presentation poem inserted into the back of Main's Treasury of Sonnets, "this my tome" names the gift of the book itself, to which Christina has added "One sonnet more," specifically as "a love sonnet" for her mother. Celebrating the mother's "fourscore years," the sonnet simultaneously commemorates her in the human eternity offered in the act of writing, and confirms the daughter's shared belief in an immortal life that "transcends the laws / Of time and change and mortal life and death." At the same time, the sonnet's closing lines act as a gentle corrective to the ending of Dante Gabriel's sonnet, which halts on Charon's shore, unable to find an eternity outside the realm of art.
Together, these holograph poems by the Rossetti siblings attest to the critical significance of material context in expressing poetic meaning. Memorializing both an individual birthday and a cultural tradition whose past continues to live in the present, the Rossettis' two sonnets are monuments marking their own place within family relationships and literary history.