Echo

Question 1

Context

Answer 1

Echo is a sound that recalls the original sound, a mimic, it fades. Interpretation of past love?
Echo was a nymph who was condemned not to speak after consorting with Zeus.

Question 2

AO5

Answer 2

William Rossetti “a hope deferred”
“God is never far from Rossetti’s poetry”
“women in life are like cold corpses and statues.”

Question 3

1. “Come to me in the silence of the night.”
   2.”silence, soft, sunlight, streams.”
2. “speaking silence.”
   4.”with soft rounded cheeks… eyes as bright as sunlight on a stream.”’

Answer 3

1. Urgent and lonely poetic voice, anaphoric imperative, suggests a person re-living romance through memory, repeating the imperatives suggests the strong influence of her past in her present.”
2. The sibilance evokes the secrecy of the affair, and the persona’s voice suggesting a lost love. WR wrote about CR “a hope deferred.”
3. Oxymoronic, emphasises the persona’s lack of fulfilment that attaining love in a “dream” cannot be replaced by a real human connection. Links to CR as she pursued spiritual love with God in heaven. Earthly love being disappointing.
4. Innocent imagery compounded by the simple simile, which is also childlike, depicting the purest of love.

Question 4

1. “too sweet, too bitter sweet.”
2. “Whose wakening should of been in Paradise.”
   3.”Where souls brimful of love”
3. “Watch the slow door, that opening letting in, lets out no more.”

Answer 4

1. Oxymoron, continues the tone of longing from Stanza 1, this dream mimics a real meeting with short-lived enjoyment, “bitter” depicts the realisation. insert AO5, love found through God.
2. Modal, crafts disappointment to Earthly life rather than paradise.
3. Spatial difference is reinforced- only Heaven is abundant with love, not like the echo of a dream.
4. The religious backdrop is continued through the threshold imagery, which invites and frustrates the persona, symbolises the gates of heaven. God is worth the wait.

Question 5

1. “That I may live/ tho’ cold in death”.
2. “death… breath”
3. “Yet come to me.”
4. “speak low” like “long ago”

Answer 5

1. Binary oppositions at the end of lines, emphasises the opposing states and the gloomy reality of life, insert AO5, suffering is self-imposed and joy is a reward after death.
2. Alternate rhymes further the juxtaposition, Rossetti reduces living to breaths and pulses which exhausts the waiting process.
3. The volatic quality, and the imperatives from the first stanza are reinforced to demonstrate the persona’s frustration.
4. Feels like the persona is suggesting a shared past and mourning a lost love, God’s perfection. However Rossetti “evades a revelation”