Remember Flashcards
“Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;”
- ‘Silent land’ - liminal state - Tractarian message of a dream like state. Biblical allusion = Habakkuh 2:20 - “Let all life be silent before Him”. - Going to the land of God - isolation and loneliness
- Certainty of death - distance - boundary
“When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.”
- “Hand” - Within her brother’s poetry, hand is symbolic of a first meeting between a man and a woman. She is almost critical of this.
- “Half” - symbolic of confusion, unsure of reality. She wants love but not the patriarchal type.
- Desperation or acceptance?
“Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.”
- “You” - Tone of exhaustion, done with relationships.
- Very instructional and non-debatable.
“Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:”
- Radicalism by subverting Victorian mourning culture as she strongly advocates for her belief in the futility of grief, whereas during the Victorian era, women were required to mourn for their partners for years, following in the footsteps of Queen Victoria.
- Volta of the poem = symbollic of the boundary between life and death. She believes that after death is beauty and peace.
- Shift in rhyme scheme - reflective of the speaker’s views of being remembered - earthly love vs heavenly love
“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 you should remember and be sad.”
- Believes grief is futile because she knows that she will be safe and happy in the presence of God
What type of poem is this?
Petrarchan Sonnet - a form inherited from the poet Petrarch in the 14th Reinessance and from Italian tradition. Traditionally written about love.
What is this poem divided into?
An octave (8 lines) and a senset (6 lines).
What speaker does she use?
A universal speaker: the same way in ‘Song’, except in this poem she is not dead yet, but has the same positive outlook on death.
