Song Flashcards
Dead
Songs
Roses
‘When I am dead, my dearest’
‘Sing no sad songs for me’
‘no roses…no cypress trees’
‘Song’ takes the form of a lyrical poem, conventionally about love, to ironically remark of death and therefore highlight the connection between love and death. The first line demonstrates the speaker’s certainty regarding death, the caesura separating her certain death with the affectionate endearment, as if death and love have no connection. She commands ‘sing no sad songs for me’, the sibilance suggesting that this supposed anguish is deceptive, and refuses symbolic grief - she wants ‘no roses’, nor ‘cypress trees’, which traditionally symbolize mourning in death - the negatives show her rejection of romantic imagery, juxtaposing life and death by indicating that death lacks the emotion life holds. The natural imagery that she rejects is typical of the pre-Raphaelites, a movements centered on reverting back to religion - this rejection of their style indicates a rejection of religion in death. The narrator refuses this pretense of holding onto emotion, regarding death at least - this was a common view of the Victorian era, with science creating doubt regarding heaven and hell, and this lack of faith in the afterlife appears apparent in ‘Song’.
Nightingale
‘I shall not see the shadows, I shall not see the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale’
The second stanza focuses on what the narrator imagines death to be, creating a rather bleak picture. The use of anaphora and synaesthesia to indicate the senses that the speaker will be lacking demonstrate the emptiness of death that she expects - the ‘nightingale’, for example, is symbolic in romantic poetry for joy in nature, but her rejection therefore denies happiness, and what is natural in death - yet, the modal verb of ‘shall’ creates a resigned tone, as if she has accepted this inevitable end.
Remember
‘And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget’
‘Haply I may remember, And haply may forget.
The parallelism in the last two lines of both stanzas interchange ‘remember’ for ‘forget’, and, with the first stanza focusing on her lover’s memory and the last on her own, the narrator appears conflicted over it being better to forget, and better to remember. Rossetti may be implying that with the loss of emotion in death, the significance of memories and self-awareness is also lost, and so the identity of a person is forgotten - therefore, it is better for her lover to perhaps ‘remember’. However, her use of archaism, with ‘thou’ and ‘haply’, may be an attempt to revert back to a more religious world, apart from the Victorian society that began doubting religion in favor of science: for the narrator, it may be better to ‘forget’ this new view on death, though it appears that she can’t help but ‘remember’ and focus on her destroyed beliefs.
