Remember by Christina Rossetti analysis

The very pattern of the poem makes it easy to remember. Rossetti chose to repeat the word ‘remember’ throughout the poem, thus allowing the reader’s mind to grow used to this pattern of repetition; as one ‘remember’ fades, the other comes into play, segueing from image to image and allowing the reader to understand intrinsically, more than intellectually, the full experience of what Rossetti is asking. It can therefore be easily split into four stanzas, each categorized by a single verse wherein the word ‘remember’ appears. However, it is not just the theme of memory that is in play here; by ‘remembering’, the narrator hopes to overcome death. As has been mentioned in many poems of the Romantic era, the true glory of poetry was that one was made immortal through the lines written.

The Speaker of the poem is scared, not of death, but of her lover forgetting her. It is to her the most brutal thing that could happen to her – her tone wavers between conciliatory and contemplative, soft and weak, as she tries to implore her beloved to never forget her even when she has ‘gone far away into the silent land’. In the first few lines, she is adamant that she must be remembered at all costs, when she is no longer physically present to remind her lover to do so.

It is interesting to note that the use of the word ‘remember’, while acting as a quick key to the heart of the poem and making it easy to try and keep it in mind, actually loses strength upon repetition. It is as though the speaker is fading away with every reiteration of the word ‘remember’, and thus by the middle part of the poem, the word ‘remember’ doesn’t have the same punch of meaning as it had in the beginning. This can be taken as the narrator losing her will to force her lover to remember her, by hook or by crook.

However, her opinion changes near the end – or the volta, as it is known. Slowly, her words linger over the idea that ‘yet if you should forget me for a while’, it would not be a terrible thing. It would allow her lover to be happy, and the speaker overcomes her own fear of being forgotten to admit that this would be an ideal situation for them. She continues with, ‘better by far that you should forget and smile / than that you should remember and be sad’.

One could take this poem, contextually, as being spoken to a loved one while on a death bed, which could count for the slow, lilting pace of the poem, growing slower and slower as it reaches towards the volta. The volta is a key point of the poem, a climax where the poem’s central themes suddenly and almost inexplicably change, and the narrator is fine with being forgotten by her beloved.

This poem is written in the style of a Petrarchan sonnet. Petrarch was an Italian poet in the sixteenth century who wrote of courtly ideals, with the themes of noble, chaste love; it is not surprising that Christina Rossetti chose this for her poem, as her father was Gabriele Rossetti, a prominent Italian scholar, poet, and political exile who taught Italian and Dante to students in England.

Historical Background

Although it has been taken as a tried and tested pattern that the Pre-Raphaelites were all melancholy, death-obsessed, and miserable every waking moment, nothing could be further from the truth. Popular culture enjoys painting the Pre-Raphaelites as their preconception, that of poets wasting away from consumption and too much drink. Christina Rossetti, on the other hand, was different.

She was the youngest child of a very gifted, loving family, and her early childhood was very happy and devoid of hardship. She had three brothers and sisters, and received a very good education – practically unheard of at the time for women. Her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossettie, became an accomplished painter and poet, her sister Maria was a renowned Dante scholar, and her brother William followed her in the fields of art and literary criticism.

In summary, the poet requests that the addressee of the poem remember her after she has died. (The addressee is presumably her lover, since they had ‘plann’d’ a ‘future’ together.) But what gives the poem a twist is the concluding thought that it would be better for her loved one to forget her and be happy than to remember her if it makes that person sad. It is this second part of the poem’s ‘argument’ that saves it from spilling over into mawkish sentimentality. In this respect, ‘Remember’ is similar to Rossetti’s earlier poem ‘Song’ (‘When I am dead, my dearest’), also written when she was in her teens: in that poem, too, Rossetti entreats someone not to sing any sad songs for her when she dies, and says it does not matter whether her lover remembers or forgets her

.

‘Remember’ is composed in the form known as the Petrarchan sonnet, rhymed abba abba cdd ece, traditionally associated with love poetry (indeed, Petrarch, who pioneered the form, wrote love sonnets to the woman he admired, Laura). As with all Petrarchan sonnets there is a volta (or ‘turn’) at the end of the eighth line and the beginning of the ninth, marking the point where the octave (eight-line section) ends and the sestet (six-line section) begins. This ‘turn’ is signalled by Rossetti’s use of the word ‘Yet’: the argument of the sonnet changes direction at this point.

The context of the poem is the Victorian era, known for its cult of mourning: people would go into mourning for Dickens’s characters when they died (e.g. Little Nell), while Victoria herself would effectively spend the last forty years of her life in mourning for her husband, Prince Albert (who, incidentally, had died the year before Rossetti’s poem was published: Albert’s death created an appetite for poems about mourning, as had Tennyson’s popular long elegy, In Memoriam, which had been published in 1850). What marks Rossetti’s treatment of this theme is the plainness and directness of her speech: she speaks to her lover with an intimate simplicity and tenderness. And, as noted at the start of this analysis, her refusal to give way to a sentimental desire to be eternally and continuously remembered by those she leaves behind.

The poem Remember by Christina Rossetti tackles those themes of love, life, death and forgetting. The speaker imagines her to be the departed and is speaking to the loved one she has left behind. The power behind the poem lies in its simplicity of language combined with its complexity of theme. Easily accessible, it is a poem with which the reader can identify. The poem is perfectly balanced, written in the form of the Italian sonnet where she conveys a single thought without irrelevant detail.

The first quatrain abba introduces the subject of the speaker’s death and the painful parting of the two lovers. Written as a monologue addressed directly to the lover she urges him to remember her when she is “gone away,/Gone far away into the silent land;” The poet uses a euphemism for death with the words “gone away” with the repetition onto the second line emphasizing the finality of death. The distance placed between them by her death and entry into the world beyond the grave is highlighted in the metaphor of “the silent land.” The speaker is aware of the distance placed between them through death and the fact that the parting has a very physical sense of distance where he can no longer “hold [her] by the hand”. This first quatrain is brought to a close in a manner very typical of Rossetti where she concludes with

            

         Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Like the lines in many of her poems there is ambivalence, an uncertainty in whether she should depart or not. This ambivalence is echoed throughout the poem as the poet changes the theme from one of remembrance to her desire that her lover should forget her.

The second quatrain sees the theme of remembrance developed to a certain point with the rhyme scheme of abba still following the rules of the Italian sonnet. The first line of this second quatrain echoes the first line of the opening quatrain where the lover is once more urged to “Remember [her] when no more day by day/ You tell me of our future that you did plann’d” This quatrain emphasises the loss of the two, that there will no longer be any future between them and that that companionship of mind will be gone. The hint of a marriage and the fact that they have advised and prayed together alludes to the closeness of their relationship. Once more there is a tension in Rossetti’s poetry where we are presented with this notion of the closeness of the lovers in life and the irretrievable distance in death.

The sonnet then enters a sestet made up of two tercets, skilfully balanced with a cdd eff rime. The first tercet takes the theme and the speaker’s thoughts in a new direction. The word “Remember” is repeated four times during the two opening quatrains, suggesting that the poet is keen to maintain the bond forged during their lives on into death. There is a consciousness in the mind of the speaker, however, that this memory may be a burden to the lover and so she deliberately changes her direction in an effort to comfort and console him in his grief. This change of direction is heralded by the use of the first word of the sestet “Yet.” This change of heart by the speaker urges her lover through an imperative, that if he should “forget me for a while/and afterwards remember, do not grieve”.

Rossetti cleverly counterpoints the three/ three pattern of tercets with a two/four pattern to use the closing four lines as a way of taking control of the lover’s emotions and attempting to reassure him that she no longer expects him to grieve for ever. There is once more that tension between her original desire, which was for him to remember and her change of allowing him to forget.

The poem concludes with her assurance that it is much better to forget and smile “Than that you should remember and be sad.” The erosion of the body in the lines “For in the darkness and corruption leave/A vestige of the thoughts that once I had” is mirrored by the erosion of memories in those still living. The way it is expressed, however, leaves the reader with the sense that this is the natural way of life and death. There is a harmony in this cycle where the body returns to the earth and there is for a time a “vestige” of memory in the minds of those remaining. The speaker reassures her lover that as life goes on, it is both natural and right that those memories fade and there is a sense of hope in her acknowledgement of what she sees as an inevitability, bringing the poem to a satisfactory ending.