Note 8, Chapter 1 of the author's Christina Rossetti in Context which the University of North Carolina Press published in 1988. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
"Forty-three stanzas or thereabouts" according to William Michael Rossetti (Works, 481), but, as Crump explains, in the only extant manuscript in the British Library "the last page of the MS is missing from the notebook, and the last two stanzas of the published version are not in the MS as it now stands" (Poem, 1:244). In my comments below I do not assume that the last two stanzas of the published version originally appeared on the last MS page.
Last modified 24 June 2007