In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death. The first three lines are a perfect example of the wedding of form and content, since the very sounds and rhythm of the poem enact the slowing of time into one, eternal moment that the poem describes. The caesura at this point in line three appears to serve the purpose of imitating the very transience of the dead hour, which comes to a close before its time, just as the line here comes to a close at the caesura before the fifth stress of the iambic pentameter line. That is, the sonnet need only revere itself . All of this suggests that the sonnet is capable of resolving the contradictions of the transient phenomenal world by creating a permanent object to be revered in and of itself.
Poetry is presented as subordinate in describing the next two powers as well.
Perhaps these contradictions can help to explain why Rossetti presented the sonnet's original design to his mother as a personal gift and chose not to disseminate the image to the market. Indeed, for this reason, the original version is lost, leaving only the lesser copy of David Main's A Treasury of English Sonnets . Perhaps the contradictions also help to explain what drove Rossetti to bury the original manuscript of the House of Life with Elizabeth Siddal. Rossetti is famous for his antipathy to the mass public, refusing in later life to exhibit his art work in major galleries and continually postponing the publication of his poetry. In presenting his design to his mother alone or in burying his sonnet sequence with Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti sought to re-capture the lost aura of the work of art.