ABSTRACT
Spector (1971) and McGann himself (1989), in which Rossetti's poetry is held up as a bold confrontation with the absence of meaning itself. Rossetti emerges as both a victim of and a spokesman for the nineteenth century's loss of faith. The meaninglessness of his verse is rendered, paradoxically, meaningful, embodying and thus disseminating a perception of the world at large as similarly meaningless.
This sonnet stands at the very centre of Rossetti's 1870 collection Poems, with fifty-one named units of poetry before it and another fifty-one after it. It stands too at the centre of the original text of Rossetti's most complex and commanding poem, the sonnet sequence The House of Life, as the first of the sonnets after those which 'treat oflove' (1870, p.188).
