Christina Rossetti's Monna Innominata is a very idiosyncratic sonnet-cycle challenging the existing male sonnet-tradition in that the female object of the male poet's love speaks as the poetic subject--a nameless female poet. The figure of a female poet as poetic speaker comes from Rosseti's ambitious poetic project to create a new sonnet mode from the female perspective. Rossetti's monna innominata sings desperately her unhappy and self-contradictory love for the specterlike beloved even fourteen times. There is nowhere any sign of the vision of the earthly accomplishment of her love. The speaker, nevertheless, stops singing, for the act of singing itself is the most important to her, and for she regards the earthly love as far less worth pursuing than the heavenly love. The course of singing the earthly love is, to her, that of renouncing that love and absorbing herself into the “Primal Love”, the love of God. Her fundamental goal is put on her soul's final self-purification through the power of the aesthetic words and their establishment of the artistic shelter. As the cycle progresses, the power of the imagination and the act of singing are emphasized; at the end of the cycle, the songs are immersed into the song of silence inhabiting her deep heart; the self-purification reaching the summit. In this way, the love songs of Rossetti's monna innominata are not completely unhappy, but they reveal the female poet's existential limitation in the Victorian England and her desperate effort to overcome it as well.

Christina Rossetti's Monna Innominata is a very idiosyncratic sonnet-cycle challenging the existing male sonnet-tradition in that the female object of the male poet's love speaks as the poetic subject--a nameless female poet. The figure of a female poet as poetic speaker comes from Rosseti's ambitious poetic project to create a new sonnet mode from the female perspective. Rossetti's monna innominata sings desperately her unhappy and self-contradictory love for the specterlike beloved even fourteen times. There is nowhere any sign of the vision of the earthly accomplishment of her love. The speaker, nevertheless, stops singing, for the act of singing itself is the most important to her, and for she regards the earthly love as far less worth pursuing than the heavenly love. The course of singing the earthly love is, to her, that of renouncing that love and absorbing herself into the “Primal Love”, the love of God. Her fundamental goal is put on her soul's final self-purification through the power of the aesthetic words and their establishment of the artistic shelter. As the cycle progresses, the power of the imagination and the act of singing are emphasized; at the end of the cycle, the songs are immersed into the song of silence inhabiting her deep heart; the self-purification reaching the summit. In this way, the love songs of Rossetti's monna innominata are not completely unhappy, but they reveal the female poet's existential limitation in the Victorian England and her desperate effort to overcome it as well.