Remember

Remember me or forget me—this tension defines the thematic argument of the poem. Death, itself too absolute and too pure to be fathomed by the limits of the intellect, triggers inevitably the only response it is capable of using in the wake of the experience of death. Unable to understand death, the intellect seeks the consolation of memories.

The poem, as an anatomy of the logic of grief, explores two radically different types of memory: one self-absorbed and self-destructive, hence unhealthy; the other inevitable and understandable, and hence healthy. Death inevitably creates memories in those who cared about the deceased and survived. Nothing in psychology suggests that the intellect can somehow un-store the recollections, happy or sad, about the dead.

The unhealthy kind of memory is elective. Those who survive sometimes dwell obsessively on the person they have lost in some misplaced sense that within such obsession rests the truest dimension of love, love that can survive death unfazed. In the opening eight lines, the speaker expects nothing less from the lover who will survive her. Remember me, remember our talks, remember the glancing touch of my hand, remember how loathe I was to part from you for even a few hours, remember our plans, our life together. Remember me, the speaker demands, even though you understand I am gone forever; the unreasonableness and egoism of the request is unclear to the speaker herself. Her demand is for her lover to inter himself within her memory, to burden even the slenderest moments of his days with heavy reality of her death. Keep me alive, she requests with a logic that edges toward parasitic, keep me alive because I am dead.

That sort of obsessive, wallowing memory, the inspiration for countless lurid Poe-esque tales and gothic movies that struggle to make heroic the attempts to live within the coaxing a-reality of memory, is juxtaposed against the speaker’s ultimatum offer in the closing six lines. Indeed, the formal construct of the Petrarchan sonnet Rossetti uses sets up an 8-6 structure, the first eight lines setting up the problem, the closing six lines offering the solution. The solution here is the speaker’s coming to terms with a far healthier kind of memory dynamic. Yes, let me stay within your memory, let those memories spark alive at those appropriate (and inevitable) moments when some impulse—a chance conversation, a painting or piece of music, the scent of a flower, a visit from on old friend—a chance something reminds the lover of the time spent with the now-deceased speaker. Then memory is unexpected, uncontrolled, authentic.

At those precious and therapeutic moments, memory becomes involuntary, not called into being, and hence an important element of the intellect’s protocol for coming to terms with the mystery of death. The intellect is too vast and complex a mechanism to entirely understand these inevitable moments of recollection, but the poet in the end embraces that dynamic as the best she (and her lover) can hope for. At those moments, the memory, some “vestige of the thoughts that once I had” [Line 12]), slips into glide and remembers without losing anchorage in the reality of its illusion. Un-haunted now by memory, unbound from the past, the lover, able to live happily now in two tenses, is gifted in the closing lines with the expectation of living happily and fully, content with comforting memories he will not, cannot, abandon.