Love and Loss. (Three Sonnets.) (fair copy, British Library)

This manuscript was copied fair and probably prepared as a gift for Jane Morris, about whom the poems were written in 1871 when DGR was staying with her at Kelmscott.

When DGR finally published the three sonnets in The House of Life of 1881 he dislocated the three as an integral group: The Lovers' Walk was sonnet XII, Love's Antiphony was sonnet XIII (and was titled “Youth's Antiphony”, and Without Her was sonnet LIII. The implied reference of this last sonnet, in that 1881 position, becomes problematic: in terms of the dramatic structure of the sequence as a whole, it might be taken to refer either to the so-called Inominata (i.e., Jane Morris) or to the so-called lost beloved (i.e., DGR's wife Elizabeth).

As the reference to June in the first sonnet indicates, that poem was written in June 1871, and the other two must date from about the same time.

The three sonnets were first published as part of the 1881 text of The House of Life , but not in sequence.