I

Rossetti's reluctance to date his sonnets is well known but imperfectly understood. His biographers usually assume that he was anxious to conceal the personal references in The House of Life, but that is only one of his reasons for not including dates. When he began to ready his poems for publication in August 1869, he wrote simply to his brother, ‘I don't think dating throughout would do’ (WEF 69.144). Shortly after Poems appeared in April 1870, he dealt with the subject more fully in a letter to Dr T. G. Hake:

One thing in your last letter gratified me particularly. The three poems to which you gave the preference … are the only three new ones in the first section though much has been done quite lately to several others and something to nearly all. Much the greater proportion of the sonnets in the House of Life are also written lately. … I daresay you will agree with me that it is not desirable to mention in print what I say above of the dates of composition. I have thought it better to omit dates in the book. (WEF 70.124)

Whatever his reasons were, Rossetti clearly assumes that Dr Hake would comprehend and endorse them on reading this letter. It is improbable that Hake was aware of any guilty secrets at this time, for he was as yet only a literary correspondent rather than the close friend he became later. The fact that Rossetti took such pleasure in Hake's preference for his most recent work is significant. Since he had been composing and revising at white heat to fill out his volume, he feared that this undignified haste would be apparent to reviewers. Late in 1869, he even proposed the desperate stratagem of including his early short story Hand and Soul in Poems ‘as it is really more a sort of poem than anything else’, but he finally decided that ‘it looked awkward there’ (WEF 69.207).