Echo

Question 1

Summary of the poem

Answer 1

• meditation on love and death
• address to a lost speaker
• maybe a lover
• set of requests to come to return
• to return in dreams
• vision of paradise

Question 2

“Souls brimful of love abide and meet”

Answer 2

• Souls in paradise
• look “thirsting” “longing” eyes watching “slow door”
• the time it to takes to go in to paradise
• yearning for reunion back to those they left on earth
• rossetti turns it around (typically those alive miss those dead

Question 3

“watch the slow door, that opening, letting in, lets out no more”

Answer 3

• the reunion not possible
• lesser version / shadow version of that reunion possible in dreams
• why speaker says “come to me in dreams”

Question 4

“pulse for pulse, breath for breath”

Answer 4

• erotic connection/undertone
• matching pulse and breath
• lovers reunited in a possible erotic dream
• gothic feeling to it -> speaker drains out her life - pulse/breath -> wishing and longing for lost lover
• Giving pulse -> giving up her own inorder to reanimate the pulse of her dead lover
• giving up her breath to breathe life back again into dead lover
• then will speak low how they did before
• unsettling end to the poem
• dark gothic rewriting - contrasts to selfless love in “remember”