23 pages • 46 minutes read
Christina Georgina RossettiRemember
Christina Georgina RossettiFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1862A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Song [When I am dead, my dearest]” by Christina Rossetti (1849; pub. 1862)
Written at the same time as “Remember,” the poem reflects the depth of Rossetti’s fascination with the death and with the dynamics of memory. Despite her relatively young age, Rossetti here imagines herself dying and looking back at life. Here, the speaker cautions whomever she is addressing (the relationship here is not clarified) not to bother with grieving at all, to allow her to edge off into the enclosing nullity of being forgotten. The poem closes with the admission that for her part, when in the grave, she will herself most likely be beyond remembering, beyond the agony of loneliness and the ache of separation.
“I Heard a Fly Buzz— When I Died—” (Poem 591) by Emily Dickinson (1844)
Much like Rossetti, whose poetry she read and admired, Dickinson frames a short lyric that records her own moment of dying. The grand moment, however, is ruined by an annoying fly that keeps buzzing about her face at the moment she dies. Much as Rossetti moves toward the acknowledgment of her own decomposition, the irony of the anticipation of the opening of heaven’s portal ruined by a trivial fly reminds Dickinson that for all the glory of her Christian soul she will be, at her death, a most un-glorious body, really dead meat and thus very attractive to the blue buzzing of flies.
“Grief” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1844)
Save for Rossetti, the most dominant and widely read woman poet of Victorian England, Browning here in a Petrarchan sonnet explores the actual dynamics of grief. This sonnet can read like a companion piece for “Remember.” Like Rossetti, Browning dismisses conventional expressions of grief—the showy lamentations and hand-wringing of the too-public grievers—arguing that authentic grief, real loss, is expressed in the forbidding quiet that indicates the profound impact of the emotional wounding, that for Browning (and Rossetti) is soul deep.
Further Literary Resources
"‘What Happens, or Rather What Doesn’t Happen’: Death and Possibility in Alice James and Christiana Rossetti” by Erika Kuvistad (2009)
A feminist reading of Rossetti and American-born diarist Alice James, the article suggests that far from fearing death, the woman-speaker in the poem, far from a helpless victim of mortality, is taunting the lover. The speaker anticipates that silent land as a space apart where, at last, she might be liberated from the oppressive control of her lover, suggested by the one-way conversation they have about their future. Given the limited opportunities offered Victorian women in their social world, death poses the tantalizing sense of possibility.
“Victorian Mourning: The Significance of Sound in Poems of Death” by Abigail Newman (2006)
In investigating the Victorian era’s fascination with death, particularly manifested in its women poets, the article sees a relationship between death and grieving and sounds, not only the sounds of funeral music itself but the last gasping for breath by the deceased, the heavy rolling heaves of crying, and even the empty words of consolation at the services. Newman sees “Remember” as a juxtaposition not of love and death but rather of love and silence, the forbidding sense of the poet’s afterlife which she juxtaposes against the conversations with her lover. Words are fleeting; the silence of the grave is permanent.
Learning Not to be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti by Kathleen Jones (2021)
The first major biography of Rossetti in more than a generation, the book argues that Rossetti curbed her inclination to passionate intellectual thought as part of her conscious decision to follow the conservative world of her upbringing. In this study, “Remember” is seen as a record of a woman’s “deliberate self-effacement.” The speaker is prepared to be the dutiful and subservient wife, that laudable ambition thwarted by death. In accord with the cultural dictate that women are to sacrifice, the poem closes with the woman generously instructing her lover to get on with his life after she is gone.
Listen to the Poem
Given its brevity and its impactful lyricism, Rossetti’s sonnet has been recorded dozens of times, many of them available on YouTube. Although most are oddly similar in that they are rushed and neglect to follow the careful phrasings set by Rossetti’s end punctuation, one reading, by British theater presence Máirín O’Hagan, is effective and immediate. The video on YouTube is an up-close tight head shot, O’Hagan’s eyes looking directly in the camera, which recreates the awkward intimacy of the poem. The recitation is recorded against a kind of echo-y sonic effect that underscores the feeling of death’s loneliness. Listen to how carefully O’Hagan separates each of the “remember me” phrases, each time her voice drops softer and softer, sounding more and more desperate. This reading captures the delicate snap of the word “Yet” in the turn to the sestet and offers the closing couplet with gentle reassurance.
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