The order of the sonnets in the collection does not necessarily reflect the chronological order of their composition, yet through the sonnets, we see a certain progression in Rossetti’s perception of Beauty. The first part of the collection reveals that the speaker’s soul is overflowing with love and passion. One notable example is in Sonnet XXI, Love-Sweetness, in its celebration of the physical beauty of his beloved:

Sweet dimness of her loosened hair’s downfall
About thy face; her sweet hands round thy head
In gracious fostering union garlanded;
Her tremulous smiles; her glances’ sweet recall
Of love; her murmuring sighs memorial;
Her mouth’s culled sweetness by thy kisses shed
On cheeks and neck and eyelids, and so led
Back to her mouth, which answers there for all.

The recurring images of the beloved’s bodily perfections gradually give way to a more sublime vision in which the poet compares his loved one with deities such as Juno, Pallas, and Venus:

Could Juno’s self more sovereign presence wear
Than thou, ’mid other ladies throned in grace? –
Or Pallas, when thou bend’st with soul-stilled face
O’er poet’s page gold-shadowed in thy hair?
Dost thou than Venus seem less heavenly fair
When o’er the sea of love’s tumultuous trance
Hovers thy smile, and mingles with thy glance
That sweet voice like the last wave murmuring there?

The second part of the collection bears an imprint of the author’s meditations on more abstract and metaphysical notions, such as the meaning of art, the artist’s calling, and eternity. The metamorphoses of Beauty in the sonnets correlates with the change in the poet’s life. He has lost his beloved (his wife) but has now found a new love. Tension exists between the dear and poignant memories of his former love and this new, present feeling. At the same time, the poet is concerned that his new love, too, may fall victim to impending death. Sonnet XXXVII reflects the core of the conflict between the old love and the new:

When that dead face, bowered in the furthest years,
Which once was all the life years held for thee,
Can now scarce bide the tides of memory
Cast on thy soul a little spray of tears,—
How canst thou gaze into these eyes of hers
Whom now thy heart delights in, and not see
Within each orb Love’s philtred euphrasy
Make them of buried troth remembrancers?
Nay, pitiful Love, nay, loving Pity! Well
Thou knowest that in these twain I have confess’d
Two very voices of thy summoning bell.
Nay, Master, shall not Death make manifest
In these the culminant changes which approve
The love-moon that must light my soul to Love?

As the poet struggles with these two conflicting emotions, he comes to realize that time is a reality that cannot be retrieved. At the beginning, he wants, through his sonnets, to build “a moment’s monument” and capture something deeply significant from the fleeting continuum of time. In the middle of the collection, however, we see the hour of love personified as a stillborn baby—totally disentangled from the fabric of time:

The hour which might have been yet might not be,
Which man’s and woman’s heart conceived and bore
Yet whereof life was barren, – on what shore
Bides it the breaking of Time’s weary sea?

By the end of the collection, having discerned the impossibility of retaining anything of value, the poet loses himself in a futile struggle against the flow of time. He accepts death as the ultimate outcome of life. The metamorphoses of Beauty, the ecstasy and anguish of Love, and the memories of former aesthetic and spiritual raptures are all engulfed by this sole, enduring reality. In the last sonnet, the poet references hope, yet he does not specify the source or the substance of this hope. It remains only an idea, a name:

But only the one Hope's one name be there,
Not less nor more, but even that word alone.