Sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Tinker Library, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Production Description
Document Title: Sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Author: Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Date of composition: 1848-50
Type of Manuscript: miscellaneous collection
Collation: [i-xii], [1-55]
Note: With the exception of the last fragment of verse, written into the
book much later, the poems here are all early work and were fair copied
into the notebook at an early date as well.
Provenance
Current Location: The Tinker Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University
Catalog Number: 1798
Physical Description
Paper: white ruled
Watermark: none
Dimensions of Document: 22.5 x 18 cm
Other Physical Features: Bound by Riviere in full red morocco. Front
and back.
Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Copyright: © Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
page images | transcript
Scholarly Commentary
Introduction
This collection is an early notebook containing DGR's fair copies of poems he wrote before 1850, as the title page indicates. Most are sonnets that he and his brother wrote as part of the game of bouts rimés they used to play with each other to hone their prosodic skills (see commentaries for Another Love and The Heart of the Night). But in addition to those bouts rimés sonnets, the collection includes a handful of other early work.
The handwriting is uniform and distinctive, with the exception of the cancelled fragment of text on page [48], which is scripted in a much later hand. From other manuscript and proof materials we can see that DGR recovered this notebook in 1868-1869 and used it as a resource for thinking about his poetry at that time. He must have considered printing some of this work in his 1870 Poems .