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Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart's quiet home,
To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
Whose service is my special dignity.1
The poem quoted above, which opens A Pageant and Other Poems, the 1881 volume in which Christina Rossetti published the sonnet sequence "Monna Innominata," depicts sonnets as "full of love," suggesting plenitude coupled with ease of formal containment, a kind of capacious abundance. The poem also associates the sonnet form with trouble. Since maternal love provides "love-lore that is not troublesome," and since the sonnet form traditionally voices erotic love, troublesome love expressed in sonnets must be erotic.2 The sound of "love-lore" evokes a major source of the sonnet's troublesome "love-lore"-Petrarch's twin loves: poetic laurels and the lady Laura. Associating inherited literary forms, and allusions to them, with ideas common at the time of their origin-with "lore,"3 Christina Rossetti thus preceded contemporary theory on genre and intertextuality. In describing the book's "many sonnets," the dedicatory poem also foreshadows "Monna Innominata's" focus on the sonnet, a focus Rossetti manifests through her use of that poetic form within poems and as structure for the fourteen-sonnet metapoem; through a prose statement alluding to seminal male and female sonneteers-Petrarch, Dante, and Barrett Browning4-and through the subtitle, "A sonnet of sonnets." The subtitle presents Rossetti's sonnets as about sonnets, owned by, and/or born of sonnets, even, as Sharon Bickle notes, as the best of sonnets.5 It also highlights a material element of "Monna Innominata": the subtitle presents the fourteen sonnets literally as one sonnet, the metapoetic structure William Whitla elucidated.6 Since each poem is preceded by quotations in Italian from Dante and Petrarch, Rossetti literally incorporates and contains the language of these male precursors in her own larger poem, ultimately in her book. Her refusal to print any of the poems separately (Whitla, p. 93) and her sense of sonnets as containers "full of love," construct her poem as the larger, more powerful container, a container of containers. Rossetti thus displays poetic mastery under the sign of female voice through a formal metaphor that...