The Convent Threshold

This is a longer narrative poem so I am including a link so you can look at it online (whenever I copy and paste poems here, I have to re-format the lines, which is annoying to say the least). Here is a copy for your reading pleasure:
http://www.web-books.com/classics/Poetry/Anthology/Rossetti_C/Convent.htm

Here's Marsh's comments:
"a dramatic monologue in which a penitent woman on the verge of entering a convent after an apparently illicit love affair, urges her lover to repent also. Partly based on the story of Heloise and Abelard, which CGR would have known in Pope's 'Eloisa to Abelard' (1717), it was the poem in her first volume that spoke most powerfully to the young Gerard Manley Hopkins, who conceived of his 'Against the World' as a response" (442).

What strikes me most profoundly in this poem is that although the speaker exhorts her former lover to look heavenward and pray for God's forgiveness for their "pleasant sin," her ultimate goal of renunciation is not necessarily to see and worship God, but rather to be one day reunited with her lover (if he repents as well). She continually looks upward toward purification, he earthward at fleeting humanity. But the last lines reveal: "There we shall meet as once we met/And love with old familiar love." What is odd here is the fact that love is not transmuted into a brotherly, chaste sort of love as one might expect; the old familiar love was a passion that lead to an illicit encounter, so it seems that she looks forward to being united with him romantically. The dreams the speaker has read like Old Testament prophetic visions: 1) a figure who ascends to heaven and discovers that love is ultimate dwarfing everything else - even knowledge (which is what Eve sought when she ate the fruit in Eden). Knowledge may also refer to experience here - could they not have experienced a more profound love had they not physicalized it? 2) The second vision is frightening and puts the speaker in her grave, her hair bedewed and her heart dust. This further emphasizes the fleeting nature of the body as opposed to the soul. She seems to descend further as he tries to grasp her and this inability to physically be together makes him 'reel.' 3) Her final dreams are all of him. We don't know what they are but they have a physical effect on her for when she wakes, her hair is grey and there is frozen blood on the sill where she struggled. Is this a struggling for his soul? next she says he may not recognize her anymore, her hair hidden, her face pale. This seems to relate back to the image of her in the clay. She is physically dead to him. Her decision to enter the convent deadens her to earthly things. The struggle in the poem once again is between eros and agape. She chooses agape, but she holds out a hope for eros in a final meeting with her love in paradise. This type of problem is typical of CGR - the unresolved feelings and unclear message create a greater tension in the poem. Just why is the speaker entering the convent?