Victorian Verse - Remember - Christina Rossetti

Critics of Christina Rossetti refer to her "ambiguity", her teasing, questioning voice which challenges the readers' interpretation of her poems and the apparent conflicts in her approach to themes of, in particular, spirituality and sexuality.  The long poem, "Goblin Market", published in 1862, best exemplifies these features of her poetry, but they are evident too in her shorter works.  Rossetti's perspective is often from one dead, or contemplating her death.  Much is infused with a sense of the loss of love, or the opportunity for love, although whether this is love in a religious or secular context is not always clear.  Love and death seem at times inextricably linked. She never married, although she received proposals three times.  Like EBB, she too suffered from life-long fragile health, dying from Grave’s Disease, a disorder of the thyroid gland, in 1894, aged 64.

“Remember” is one of her most famous poems and a popular choice for reading at funerals.  It is a Petrarchan sonnet; it is written in iambic pentametre and the rhyme scheme of the octet is abbaabba and the sestet cddece.  This cyclical rhyme scheme is particularly suited to the theme of going away in death and returning in memory, as is the repetition.

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

The poem is an address from the poet, contemplating her own death, to her lover.  The reader’s perspective is that of the lover’s.  The poem opens with an imperative, demanding that the lover “Remember” her.  The references to “the silent land” and “hold… by the hand” echoes Orpheus’s descent into the Underworld, to reclaim his dead Eurydice.  The finality of death, as opposed to a parting in life, is expressed with the phrase “half-turn to go yet turning stay”.  In life, you can change your mind about leaving; in death, it is a one-way street. 

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Death negates future plans.  She speaks as if she has been aware of this always; it is “our future” but only he (“you”) seems to have planned it.  It was not a joint activity, suggesting its futility.  All the lover can do is “remember” – it will be too late to give her advice or have hope for the future.

The volta at the sestet indicates a new realisation by the poet and a shift in the advice to the lover:

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

She admits the possibility that her lover will, at times, forget her, but that he should not feel badly about it.  Although her physical self is now in the darkness of the grave and decomposing (“corruption”), she hopes that something of her mind and spirit will remain to sustain him and that when he does remember her, he is happy to do so. 

Although there is something self-indulgent about imagining yourself looking down on the people left behind after you have gone (and apparently imagining your own funeral, surrounded by your mourning friends and family, is common), ultimately the message is one of selflessness, in that she wishes him to be happy in his remembrance.