Rossetti has been preparing a very intricate balance between directness and evasion through his use of meaning. This creates a separate world of the imagination in which his abstract themes and concrete details of technique block the reader's desire to refer the poem back to the 'real' world, even while it invokes 'real' emotions, situations, and objects in order to create its fictions.
[...]
Such power given to abstractions that seem yet more real than the ordinary world of persons and objects is the power of allegory, and the fact that in this sonnet Rosetti makes the ordinary world ambivalent through his technical devices is what I mean by saying that Rossetti's allegorizing lacks the literal level: the level at which things are just things and persons are persons and a rose is a rose is a rose.
This lack of the literal level is felt as such by the reader who then tries to supply it from the other realities of sound and poetic technique -- thus linking allegory to unrealism. With such pure intentions, the reader encounters the next line, 'Bewildering sounds, such as spring wakens to,' which immediately pushes the reader back onto the level of allegory and makes him ask, what sounds? Answer: 'bewildering sounds.' You said it, D.G. Rossetti!
-- Veronica Forrest-Thomson, from 'Lilies from the Acorn' (1973-75?), Chicago Review 56: 2/3 (Autumn 2011), pp. 40-41
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