Newborn Death

Like the Willowwood sequence, this pair had a key function in The House of Life project from the very beginning. At least five of these six sonnets were written in two days in December 1868, and all six were complete by mid-January 1869. Willowwood opened the initial sequence of sixteen that DGR printed in the Fortnightly Review in March 1869, and “Newborn Death” closed that sequence. In terms of the structure of The House of Life, these sonnets clearly reach back to the beginning—specifically, to Bridal Birth, which was the first sonnet in the 1870 Poems (it was Sonnet II in 1881).

The climactic position of the “Newborn Death” sonnets is underscored by the sonnet immediately preceding, “He and I”, which was a last addition to the sequence for the 1870 volume. Having culminated his via negativa in “He and I”, the poet now seeks to imagine the shape of a life in death. The figures of the playful child and the “helpful daughter” in the first sonnet define the benevolence implied in the final image (lines 13-14). Recalling the trope of drinking Lethe's water of oblivion, DGR subtlely but certainly alters it: line 14 represents a gift-giving ceremony, and line 13 speaks not of forgetfulness but of awareness.

The octave of the second sonnet acknowledges but also questions the first sonnet's final benevolent figures. The sestet then puts the question to that questioning. The implication of the sestet appears to be an imagining of Death not as a terminus to the dynamics of living but as an integral part of those dynamics. In making this imaginative proposal DGR is of course drawing on the mythological resources of a Christian economy, as he does in all of his work. But it is important to recognize that he recovers those resources in an aesthetic mode. DGR imagines the figures of Love, Song, and Art undergoing a kind of Liebestod (lines 12-13), and that imagination then transforms itself into the paradox of the final line. But in this context the paradox, which expresses a Christan commonplace, comes to us in a purely (in every sense) figural form—exactly the way Christian ideas are handled everywhere by DGR, most memorably in his early poems, and most unmistakeably in the “Mary's Girlhood” sonnets.

Thus the “meaning” of the final line, transparent in a Christian economy, here turns deeply mysterious—some would say (and have said), turns meaningless, as if DGR were simply recapitulating formulary terms and ideas. But a less orthodox reader would argue that DGR's treatment represents an act of “saving the appearances”. Blake called it keeping the divine vision in a time of trouble. DGR's “faith” here, if such it can be called, is at once decorative and dessicated, for he is aware that the Christian mythos, like his own works, survive only as “cold commemorative” things (“A Superscription” line 14). Hence the adherence to all these loved but lost forms, all the “dead deathless” hours, becomes a type of dark faithfulness: as if DGR drew life out of death precisely by acknowledging that it cannot be done, and therefore must be undertaken.

It has long been believed that DGR wrote these two sonnets around 19 December 1868 (because of WMR's diary for 19 December 1868 where he says that DGR had just written a sonnet on death, which was assumed to be one of this pair (see WMR, Preraphaelite Diaries and Letters 339 ). But in fact it was written much earlier, in August, when DGR sent copies of the two poems in a letter to James Smetham with a request for his opinion about three possible readings for line 11 of the second sonnet (see Fredeman, Correspondence 68. 120.

The sonnet on death mentioned by WMR in his diary seems not to have been any of the sixteen that he initially published in the Fortnightly Review in March 1869 under the heading “Of Life, Love, and Death: Sixteen Sonnets”. It was perhaps the sonnet “Death's Songsters”..

Corrected copies of the two sonnets are also gathered in the Fitzwilliam composite “House of Life” sequence, along with a fair copy of the second sonnet in Charles Fairfax Murray's hand.

Neither of the sonnets' texts were substantively changed in any of their various printings.

First printed as (the concluding) Sonnets XV-XVI in the initial Fortnightly Reviewsequence of sonnets (March 1869) ofThe House of Life project. The poems were printed again in thePenkill Proofs in August and kept through all prepublication texts until the publication of the 1870Poems. The sonnets are numbered XLVIII-XLIX in The House of Life as published in the 1870 volume, and XCIX-C in the sequence as published in the 1881 Ballads and Sonnets.

Line 11 of the first sonnet of the pair calls attention to the way DGR repeatedly treats his own life as if it were a myth to be mined for imaginative details. Here the birth of the poet's stillborn daughter is (once again) recalled (see “Stillborn Love” as well as the running theme of the child in the sequence).

“Newborn Death I”: This sonnet concludes in several questions that are not answered in either of the sonnets. But the doleful import that might surround such questions is sharply mitigated in the emblematic options offered in this sonnet's sestet. As is usual with DGR, when problematic issues arise the works tend to respond with symbolic figurae rather than with ideas or thematic exposition. Here, the figures revealed in the sestet generate a set of further figures in the sonnet's companion, where the persistence of the rhetoric of questioning itself becomes a figure of the persistence of desire and erotic purpose.

“Newborn Death II”: As “Newborn Death I” connects directly to its predecessor, “He and I”, so this sonnet connects directly to its predecessor, “Newborn Death I”, and in particular to the question that is left standing at the end of the latter.