Rossetti worked on a few sonnets that may have been intended for eventual inclusion in HL but that for some reason of his own remained unfinished or suppressed. Two untitled love sonnets written in Italian and sent to JM during the period of the ‘Kelmscott love sonnets’ are too personal and too ‘fleshly’ for the sequence, even if they had been translated. In addition, they are neither polished nor idiomatic examples of Italian poetic diction of any era. They are offered below (in translation) because of their obvious affinity with other HL sonnets of the 1868–71 period that Oswald Doughty labelled ‘regenerate rapture’. The same may be said of English May (1869), written out of DGR's concern for JM's health as a sort of private verse epistle, not published until 1886 in CW and there misleadingly dated 1854 by WMR.

Some have argued that the bouts-rimés sonnets written between 1847–49 anticipate at times the style, diction, imagery and themes of HL. Such anticipation as may be found is too general to repay study, except in the case of Idle Blessedness (Works 267), which anticipates Autumn Idleness (HL 69). These poems are games, at most exercises in technique and convention, often mere verbal display in the manner of the Italian improvisatore. I have not included them: they may be found in PFB): 1) 14–16, 56–65 and Works 263–67. Another problem with reading anything into them is that it is not always possible to determine whether they were written by DGR, WMR or CGR: see WMR's accounts in SR 79–80 and Works 673–74, Baum's in PFB): 1) 14–15 and Frances Winwar's, cited in PRISM 27.86.