Collected Works, ed. W. M. Rossetti, 2 vols. (London, 1888), 355. In the pages following all quotations of Rossetti's poetry are taken from this edition.

Rossetti's 'Ave" (1847), which he later mined for his other religious poems, provides the germ of this sonnet in its one clear prefigurative image, when the speaker asks Mary:

Didst thou discern confusedly
That holier sacrament, when He,
The bitter cup about to quaff,
Should break the bread and eat thereof? (I, 245)

The High Church influence appears in the allusion to the sacrament of Communion — something never found in the works of Hunt.


Last modified December 2001