Nature & Symbolism

“Or if these bloom when worn-out autumn grieves” — the conditional “or if” immediately complicates the opening prescription: what if they do bloom out of season? The autumn is “worn-out” — not merely dying but exhausted, depleted, as though it has used up all its resources. “Grieves” personifies the season as mourning — not for any specific loss but as a condition of being late, of having passed the moment of fullness.

“Let them lie hid in double shade of leaves” — the out-of-season violets should be concealed, doubly shaded: first by the dying leaves of autumn, second by their own foliage. The “double shade” creates an image of something beautiful, small, and vulnerable taking cover rather than displaying itself. The imperative “let them lie hid” is both practical advice and emotional instruction: if you feel love out of season, conceal it; don't let it be seen.

“Nor speak of hope to that late lingering” — the phrase “late lingering” is the first of the poem's several descriptions of the out-of-season condition. It is “late” (chronologically past its time) and “lingering” (persisting beyond its natural endpoint). The injunction not to “speak of hope” to this condition is its most painful dimension: the autumn violets should not be made to stand for anything optimistic. They are beautiful and real, but they should not promise what they cannot deliver.

“Ere it had left me, / How many a tender light / Hath died upon my way!” — the exclamation mark is the poem's only moment of overt emotion, and it is retrospective rather than present: wonder at how many small, tender things have died in the course of a single life. “Tender light” is characteristically Rossettian — not dramatic illuminations but gentle, small lights, the ordinary consolations and connections of daily life. The phrase “upon my way” frames life as a journey, and the journey as one along which lights are extinguished rather than kindled.

The volta opens with “Yet” — the characteristic Rossettian signal of reversal, used in “Remember,” “De Profundis,” and “Out of the Deep” to shift direction at the turn. Here it introduces not theological consolation but natural fact: a new violet may appear. The qualifier “may” is important — it is possibility, not certainty. The volta does not promise; it opens a conditional space.

“Yet violets shall come, dear” — the word “dear” is the sonnet's most intimate moment. Its addressee is ambiguous: a beloved? The reader? The violets themselves? The tenderness of “dear” applied in the midst of bleakness creates a precise emotional register: not resigned, not triumphant, but quietly, persistently affectionate. “Shall come” moves from the “may” of the volta's possibility to something approaching certainty — not a strong prediction but a sustained hope.

“With summer softly going” — the final image is one of the most quietly beautiful in the collection. Summer does not end; it goes “softly” — departing gently, without violence, leaving behind its last gift (the autumn violets) as it withdraws. The poem ends on a note of gentle motion rather than stasis: summer is still moving, the violets are still coming, nothing is fully fixed or finally over. It is Rossetti's most understated form of hope — not the resurrection triumph of “The Thread of Life” or the golden city of “They Desire a Better Country,” but simply: it is not yet entirely winter. The violets will come.

The catalogue of morning pleasures — swallows, peach-blossom, cherry-blossom — is a Pre-Raphaelite inventory of exact, sensuous natural detail. “Crossing and recrossing” captures the swallows' flight pattern precisely: not a single trajectory but the repeated crossing of the same aerial space, restless and purposeful simultaneously. The swallows are in motion; the blossoms “cling” — held to their branches, briefly, before they fall. Even in the smile's catalogue, the verb “cling” introduces a note of precariousness: the beautiful things are there, but they are held by clinging, not by permanence.

“After all the wearying long suspense / To find how short the night, how bright the morn” — the phrase “wearying long suspense” is the octave's most psychologically precise formulation. The night was not merely long but suspenseful — waited through with anxiety, not simply endured. The discovery — “how short the night, how bright the morn” — reads as genuine surprise, as though the speaker had not been certain the night would end at all. The octave's emotional logic is now clear: the smile is not innocent pleasure but relief, the joy of someone who genuinely feared the dark and finds it over.

“So much goodness crowding on the way” — the abundance of the world is now experienced not as pleasure but as excess, as something that cannot be fully received: “too much to grasp, too much to hold or keep.” The tripling of “too much” insists on the insufficiency of the self's capacity relative to the world's abundance. This is not a complaint about the world's stinginess but about the self's limitation — goodness crowds in; the speaker cannot contain it all. The verb “crowding” is almost aggressive: the good things press against the speaker, and she cannot hold them. Joy becomes loss in the moment of its arrival.

“On hearts that can no more than be” — the poem's final phrase is its most philosophically compressed. The heart's only capacity, at the limit of experience, is simply to be — to exist, to be present, to neither grasp nor refuse but simply endure the overwhelming surplus of the world's sweetness. “Can no more than be” is simultaneously a statement of limitation (the heart can do nothing more than exist) and a statement of sufficiency (simply being is, at the last, enough). The phrase echoes “The Thread of Life”'s “I am even I” — the irreducible being of the self, beyond possession or performance. But where “The Thread of Life” finds in this irreducibility a theological foundation for self-offering, “Smile and Sigh” finds in it a kind of overwhelmed passivity — the heart, at the limit of its capacity, can only be present to what it cannot hold.

“I have forgotten everything / I used to know so long ago” — the completeness of “everything” is the line's most devastating word. Not some things, not much, but everything. The repetition of “I used to know” — appearing in lines 1, 2, and 4 — creates the obsessive circling of genuine loss: the speaker returns to the formulation three times, unable to move past it, as though the repetition might recover what it names. “So long ago” adds temporal depth — this is not recent loss but the loss of something from a different life, a different self.

The list — “spring and winter and the fall” — is deliberately unordered: spring, then winter, then autumn, skipping summer (already named). The disordering of the seasons suggests the speaker's disorientation — time no longer has a meaningful shape; the seasons blur into undifferentiated passage.

“I am weary of it all” — the most direct statement of spiritual exhaustion in the collection. No qualification, no concessive “though,” no “yet.” Simply: weary of all of it. This is the acedia of the medieval spiritual tradition — the noonday demon, the spiritual torpor that makes everything seem flat, meaningless, and unendurable. In the devotional context, acedia is not depression in the clinical sense but a specifically spiritual failure: the inability to find meaning in what one knows, theologically, to have meaning.

“These days that pass and do not stay” — the complaint is not that the days are painful but that they do not stay: they offer nothing worth holding, and they do not remain long enough to offer it. Time is experienced as pure passage, not as meaningful duration.

Crucially, each “Yet” is paired with the adjective “new”: “new swallow,” “new blossom,” “new hope.” The newness is the point — not that the swallow, blossom, and hope are unusual or extraordinary, but that each spring, each flowering, each woe produces them afresh. The world renews; the self is weary. The tension between the world's persistent newness and the self's exhaustion is the volta's central paradox. “New hope with every woe” is the most philosophically compressed: even suffering generates hope, apparently automatically, despite the speaker's weariness. The hope is not earned or chosen; it arrives with the woe as its natural companion.

“I tune my hope to face the woe” — the poem's final line returns to the musical metaphor of the title with a new precision. To “tune” is to adjust a musical instrument to the correct pitch — in this case, the speaker tunes her hope to the keynote of facing woe. The preposition “to face” is the poem's most important grammatical choice: hope is not tuned to overcome woe, or to escape it, or to transcend it, but simply to face it — to turn toward it, remain oriented toward it, be present to it without flinching. This is the keynote: not joy, not triumph, not even peace, but the orientation of hope toward woe. The musical metaphor resolves with quiet precision — the speaker who has forgotten her old songs has found the note to which her life is now tuned, and it is this.