Remember Flashcards
Silent
Form
‘silent land’
‘Remember’ is a poem centered on death, ironically taking the form of a love poem - this petrachan sonnet is used to demonstrate the connection between love and death. The metaphor of a ‘silent land’ for death implies that there is nothing, no emotions or feelings, in the afterlife, but the choice of a euphemism softens the blow, as if this is a truth that is hard to accept. It indicates a conflict of worlds, between religion and science to portray death, a common struggle that many Victorians experienced with science causing doubt in the traditional Christian view of the afterlife.
Gone
‘gone away, gone far away’
The incremental repetition, which escalates due to the intensifier, demonstrates death and life as being separated forever, a despairing tone used to highlight this distance - it reinforces the distance that is growing between the speaker and her lover and emphasizes the boundary that exists between life and death. This echoes the Victorian obsession with death, and perhaps the panic at what lies beyond the afterlife is influenced by religious doubt. The iambic pentameter, regular rhythm and repetitive structure echo the circle of life, with death an inevitable part of the equation, yet the end-stop after nearly every line expressed the finality of death - it is this mystery regarding the relentless force of death that created the obsession in the Victorian period.
Remember
The volta, ‘Yet, indicates the implicit change in response to death, reinforced by the difference in language: when previously using imperatives, such as ‘remember me’, to demonstrate her assurance about death, the narrator changes to the more tentative ‘if’, appearing uneasy regarding death. The term ‘remember’ runs like a refrain throughout the sonnet, however its power seems to decrease through the poem, rather as if the voice and memory of the speaker is fading from life: The first two imperative verbs are placed at the start rather than the end of the first and fifth lines, but towards the end of the poem it is further qualified in adverbial sub-clauses by ‘And afterwards’ and ‘Better .. you / Than .. you’ in the sestet, losing its association with ‘me’. This juxtaposition in certainty and uncertainty may show a personal conflict for the author - Rossetti, a strong religious woman would have no doubt experienced some kind of struggle between the changing Victorian society, and her Christian faith - it appears that she no longer knows how to respond to death.
