Remember by Christina Rossetti

Christina Rosetti was born in London in 1830. She was one of four children, her parents were Italian. Her father, Gabriele Rosetti was a poet. One of her brothers, Dante Gabriele Rosetti was a poet and a painter. She is best represented in poetry by her ballads and mythical religious lyrics. (www.poets.com)

In the 1880s, She contracted Grave’s disease, a thyroid disorder and in 1891, Rosetti developed cancer, from which she died in London on December 29th, 1894. (www.poets.com)

The poem, as the title of it says, deals with remembrance. In this case the writer is addressing someone, a husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend. I feel that this work falls squarely into the category of lyric poetry. Lyric expresses the emotions of the poet as well as their thoughts and feelings. The poet is asking their significant other to remember them when they go away, which I interpret as dying. Through the first eight lines of the poem the writer is firm on the wish that their lover remember them, seemingly wishing for them to not move forward, but to keep up a vigil of remembrance of the other. In lines nine through fourteen the writer has a change of heart, saying if the lover has bad thoughts of their past, as well as feels guilty for forgetting the writer for an extended period of time saying “ Line 13:Better by far you should forget and smile, Line 14:Than that you should remember and be sad.”,In the end the writer chose to see past their self interest in being remembered and realized that the happiness and well being of their partner was more important, if they are truly loved they can never be forgotten.

The only example of a figure of speech I found was a metaphor used in line thirteen, “Better by far you should forget and smile”, by far being the metaphor. The poet, Christina Rosetti, is Italian, and her poem falls squarely under the Italian version of a sonnet. The Petrarchan ( or Italian ) sonnet characteristically consists of an eight-line octave, rhyming abbaabba, that states a problem, asks a question, or expresses an emotional tension, followed by a six-line sestet, of varying rhyme schemes, that resolves the problem, asks a question, or resolves the tension ( The Encyclopedia Britannica Ready Reference 2005 CD-ROM ). If you look at the first eight lines, they perfectly match up with the rhyme scheme mentioned in the definition above. They also have an iambic meter, which is also referred to as a rising meter. The next requirement satisfied, an emotional tension, is defined in the poem. The poet wants their loved one to remember them when they are gone. The last six lines in the poem are a mix of different meters, line fourteen, for example, is Trochaic, which is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. The tension is resolved when the poet realizes