Mid-Rapture

Alternately titled: Between Kisses

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

General Description

Date: 1871
Rhyme: abbaaccadeedff
Meter: iabic pentameter
Genre: sonnet

Bibliography

◦ WMR, DGR Designer and Writer, 201

◦ Baum, ed., House of Life, 102

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

With their characteristic wordplay in the phrase “deep-drawn”, lines 10-12 construct an emblem of DGR's aesthetic idea about the art of portraiture as he practised it: that the woman represented in his pictures is an image reflecting an ideal figure of DGR himself. Relevant here is “The Portrait”, and in particular the conclusion where the correspondence between the image and its maker is emphasized.

Textual History: Composition

Five manuscripts of the sonnet are recorded. There is a fair copy in the Boston Public Library and another recorded as being in the Symington Collection, Rutgers University Library, but the curators report that it cannot be found. The other manuscripts are the copies in the Fitzwilliam, and the fair copies in the Princeton composite “House of Life” manuscript and in the Bodleian Kelmscott Love Sonnets group. The Boston, Rutgers, and Bodleian copies are all titled “Between Kisses”.

Printing History

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

Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Source File: 11-1871.raw.xml