Department of English
Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University
Remember
(1849, 1862)
Christina
Rossetti
(December 5, 1830–December 29, 1894)
Remember me when I am
gone away, |
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Gone far away into the silent land; |
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When you can no more hold me by the hand, |
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Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. | |
Remember me when no more day by day | 5 |
You tell me of our future that you planned: | |
Only
remember me; you understand |
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It will be late to counsel then or pray. | |
Yet if you should
forget me for a while |
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And
afterwards remember, do not grieve: |
10 |
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. | |
"Remember" Notes
This poem is dated July 25, 1849. It was first published in 1862 in Rossetti's first collection of poems Goblin Market and Other Poems.
7–8 Only...pray:
11–12 For...had:
12 vestige:
When I am dead, my
dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget. |
5 10 15 |
Letters
To William Michael Rossetti, 19 September 1853
[...] This morning I commenced a remarkable doggerel on the P.R.B. &c.; but perhaps if I give you a sample of it you may not pant for its completion.
The two Rossettis
(brothers they) |
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And Holman Hunt and
John Millais, |
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With Stephens chivalrous and bland, |
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And Woolner in a
distant land, |
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In these six men I awestruck see | 5 |
Embodied the great P.R.B. |
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D. G. Rossetti offered two | |
Good pictures to the public view: | |
Unnumbered ones great John Millais, |
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And Holman more than I can say | |
+ + + + + + + | |
William Rossetti calm and solemn |
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Cuts up his brethren
by the column. |
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+
+
+
+ *
* * |
10 |
You may guess that at this point
of my letter I came to a stand, from the extra finish bestowed on the
three last asterisks. [...]
—Christina Rossetti, Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 19 Sep. 1853, Poems and Prose,
edited by Simon Humphries, Oxford UP, 2008, p. 385.
To Adolph Heinmann, [? April 1862]
On the subject of my little book I have not received kinder or dearer letters than the two which you and your wife have sent me. But some of my verses have grieved you: I recall titles and subjects, and suspect At Home, and Shut Out, of being amongst these offenders. If sad and melancholy, I suggest that few people reach the age of 31 without sad and melancholy experiences: if despondent, I take shame and blame to myself, as they show that I have been unmindful of the daily love and mercy lavished upon me. But remember, please, that these and the rest have been written during a period of some 14 years, and under many varying influences of circumstances, health and spirits; that they are moreover not mainly the fruit of effort, but the record of sensation, fancy, what not, much as these came and went. My next volume--should a next volume ever come to pass--may, I hope, show an improved tone of mind and feeling: but for the present, you must even accept the actual volume with all its shortcomings. [...]
—Christina
Rossetti, Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 19 Sep. 1853, Poems and
Prose,
edited by Simon Humphries, Oxford UP, 2008, p. 386.
To Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 7 May 1864
Don't think me a perfect weathercock. But why rush before the public with an immature vol.? I really think of not communicating at all with Mac at present: but waiting the requisite number of months (or years, as the case may be) until I have a sufficiency of quality as well as quantity. Is not this after all my best plan? If meanwhile my things become remains, that need be no bugbear to scare me into premature publicity. Not that the brotherly trouble you have already taken need be lost, as your work will of course avail when (and if) the day of publication comes. [...]
—Christina
Rossetti, Letter to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 7 May 1864, Poems and
Prose,
edited by Simon Humphries, Oxford UP, 2008, p. 387.
Sonnet 71
No longer mourn for me
when I am dead |
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Than you shall hear
the surly sullen bell |
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Give warning to the
world that I am fled |
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From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell. | |
Nay, if you read this line, remember not | 5 |
The hand that writ it, for I love you so | |
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, | |
If thinking on me then should make you woe. | |
O, if, I say, you look
upon this verse |
|
When I, perhaps,
compounded am with clay, |
10 |
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, | |
But let your love even with my life decay, | |
Lest the wise world should look into your moan | |
And mock you with me after I am gone. | |
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 71, The Complete Poems,
edited by R. W. Crump and Betty S. flowers, Penguin, 2001, p. 240.
But whether these interesting dis/similarities mean that CGR's sonnet is 'modelled' on Shakespeare's (as John Kerrigan (ed.), The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (1986), 44) is questionable. On 3 December 1864, CGR responded to W. H. Budden's observation that one of her sonnets--one which 'cannot have been written less than 15 years ago'—showed a 'singular coincidence' with lines of Shakespeare's (L 1.204). Neither her sonnet, nor what was presumably a sonnet of Shakespeare's, is identified in the letter; but, among the small number of her sonnets written not less than fifteen years before—and in print by—1864, this would seem that most likely to have drawn Budden's observation. But CGR commented that she had no recollection of ever reading the lines of Shakespeare that Budden had in mind, and was perhaps even less likely to have read them when she composed her sonnet.
—Simon
Humphries, "Remember," Notes, Poems and Prose, by Christina
Rossetti,
edited by Simon Humphries, Oxford UP, 2008, p. 409.
Vocabulary
caesura
rhyme scheme
rhyme
rhythm
alliteration
consonance
tone
Study Questions
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Response 1:
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Christina
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Reference
Rossetti, Christina. The Complete Poems. Edited by R. W. Crump and Betty S. Flowers, Penguin, 2001.
Further Reading
Rossetti, Christina. Goblin Market and Other Poems. 1862. 2nd ed, Macmillan, 1865.
Rossetti, Christina. The Prince's Progress and Other Poems, 1866.
Rossetti, Christina. Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book. 1872. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes, Macmillan, 1907.
Rossetti, Christina. A Pageant and Other Poems. 1881.
Rossetti, Christina. Verses. 1893.
Hassett, Constance W. Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. U
of Virginia P, 2005.
Connor, Steven. "'Speaking
Likenesses': Language and Repetition in Christina Rossetti's Goblin
Market." Victorian Poetry, vol. 22, no. 4, 1984, pp.
439–48.
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