[The Zodiac of All Beauty]

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

General Description

Date: 1873
Rhyme: abbaac
Meter: iambic pentameter
Genre: epigram

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

DGR sketched this epigram, which he left in a fragmentary state, in two of his notebooks. It is an interesting and important piece of writing because of the implicit gloss it makes on “The House of Life”, and on the intense, not to say “fleshly” neoplatonism of DGR's approach to his work and his life.

Textual History: Composition

A text of the verses appears in the Ashley Library's so-called Small Notebook II, but a more complete text is in one of the Duke Library's notebooks. The lines date from the early 1870s.

Printing History

A text of the epigram was first published among the “Versicles and Fragments” in WMR's 1911 collected edition (page 242). This text differs considerably from the two manuscript texts that we have.

Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Source File: 14-1873.raw.xml