Rossetti's "House of Life" is a collection of 100 sonnets, written over a longer period of time that describe the narrator’s relationship with two women. These are the wife, based on the poet's wife Elizabeth Siddal, and the woman in the affair, based on the poet's mistress Jane Morris. The sonnets within this collection are written as one continuous emotional roller coaster that torments the subject. The collection is divided into two sections, "Youth and Change" (Sonnets 1 to 59) and "Change and Fate" (Sonnets 60 to 101).
"Youth and Change" starts out with the beginning of love and passion to the wife, as two bodies become one. However, the body fades and death soon takes the young wife away. The next sonnets in the collection are based around despair and pain, the narrator does not understand the unnecessary suffering that he has to go through. After these poems full of grieve, a section contemplating death in general is set out. A range of sonnets talks about the experience of death as a concept. The poet discusses the fate of children, couples, and other relatives, even a short mentioning of people that never have been met. The poet starts now to consider God and faith, the inevitable influence of Satan. The poems become more and more desperate. However, in the end the poet can smile again, accepts death as part of life and sees it as the child he never had with his wife. The dead woman becomes and idolized version of love itself.
The second part "Change and Fate", contains several sonnets connected to change in some way. The poet contemplates aging, light and dark throughout the day, the changing of seasons and other natural occurrences. Most of these are directly related to some emotional stance of the narrator within the individual poem. At last, the second woman enters. The passion is tumultuous and fierce, often compared to the first woman.
Rossetti's "House of Life" was compiled and published over more than a decade, a work of personal love and lust the author cherished. The ethereal description of the personal emotions of the narrator make this collection exceptional as it allows for single sonnets to be taken out and read, or the whole thing as one long emotional journey.
