Remember

Although contemporary readers of “Remember” not as versed in the poetry of the Renaissance might not readily recognize the poem’s form, Rosetti’s readers in the Victorian Era would certainly have recognized the form of her lyric as a sonnet—more to the point, given its structural make-up, a Petrarchan sonnet. Acquainted with the convention of the sonnet that dates back to 14th-century Italy, readers in Rosetti’s era would expect, as with most Petrarchan sonnets, a love song. The opening line indeed, with its wistful tone that speaks of fast-approaching separation, appears to conjure a familiar love scene: two lovers moving inexorably toward a painful goodbye. The sonnet opens conventionally. “Remember me when I am gone away” (Line 1). The first-person voice gives the approaching goodbye its wrenching depth and its emotional immediacy.

In the second line, however, the sonnet twists suddenly from an anatomy of long-distance love to an investigation into the psychology of dying, a real letting go, lovers adjusting to the idea of death itself as the speaker reveals she is departing, yes, but for “the silent land” (Line 2). The phrase “silent land” softens what becomes the reality of the poem: The silent land is the afterlife, with its forbidding sense of permanent separation. The speaker is dying. And given the animated conversations that the speaker recalls with her lover (revealed in Lines 4,5,6), they are young, eagerly anticipating a future together, thus death has imposed its absolute logic too soon, too early. “Remember” is not just a sonnet about death but rather about death at a young age, death at the very threshold of life.

More than a century before psychologists would begin to investigate the stages through which pass a person who understands death is real and fast approaching, Rossetti, herself fascinated by theological speculations about the nature of the afterlife and the intellect’s struggle to embrace entirely the reality of death, suggests that the passage is dominated by two contrasting impulses: first denial and then acceptance. The speaker begins possessed of a panicky selfishness with the implicit denial of death’s reality. Keep thinking about me, she pleads, allow me to inhabit your thoughts and dominate what will inevitably be morose meditations on how deeply you miss me and the way we used to plan our future together, so carelessly unaware of the passing of time. By co-opting a kind of permanent space within her lover’s memory, the speaker lays claim to an immortality. As long as I drive your memory, she reasons, I exist and thus I can counter the terrifying absoluteness of death. “When you can no more hold me by the hand” (Line 3), remember me. The phrase recurs three times in the opening eight lines, each time the speaker’s demands seem more shrill, more desperate as her panic begins to rise. Remember me even though it will be too late to talk or pray together, really to do the little things we take for granted now. In this, she encourages her lover to grieve, to sustain the integrity of her death, to allow her absolute absence to become a kind of consoling (and decidedly creepy) presence. Be haunted by absence—the emotional terrorism and selfishness of her plea lost to a young person struggling to understand the iron logic of death. Only in the act of memory, there within the attractive soft prison of her lover’s memory, she will never need to accept the finality of death ever as she rushes toward it.

The dramatic change of heart in the speaker’s self-involved lamentation begins with the word “yet” (Line 9). Without pause, without explanation, the speaker eases back from the oppressive selfishness of her plea to her lover to never entirely relinquish their love. If in the opening eight lines the tone seems insistent, shrill, and self-serving, in the closing six lines the speaker embraces inevitability and evidences an expansive sense of compassion and understanding for the same lover she, just a few lines earlier, cursed to become a kind of human haunted house.

Death itself emerges in the closing six lines. Not an abstract, not a pleasant and conveniently reassuring euphemism, death is now real and waiting. The speaker no longer sees herself as a comforting and lingering memory. Rather now she is a corpse, her body exposed to the unrelenting cellular holocaust of “darkness and corruption” (Line 11). Without sharing the logic of her change of heart, the speaker softens considerably to a serene selflessness and the implicit acceptance of death’s reality. She indicates now that, certainly, she will understand when, inevitably, her lover will “forget [her] for a while” (Line 9). As long as there exists somewhere in her lover’s memory a lingering sense, a “vestige” (Line 12), of what she had once been, that will be enough. In a final gesture of heroic selflessness, the compassion of which is fully understandable only by those who face death and who must look about at all who they will leave behind, all that will survive them. Better that her lover live a rich and full life forgetting her than to live a sad and unhappy life, a sort of non-life, clinging to memories of what they had. Better to be happy and let me go, the speaker suggests, a gesture that inevitably relegates the speaker to the very oblivion that is at the terrible heart of death.

“Remember” is then a love poem of sorts in the Petrarchan tradition. In giving voice to the nearly-departed rather than to the survivor, the sonnet offers the highest love of all, love that sacrifices nothing less than the self. Love me, the poet says to her about-to-be bereft lover, love me enough to forget me. Without affirming the traditional solace of some gaudy and myth-y afterlife as her pilgrim’s destination, the speaker heroically embraces in the closing lines a most chilling darkness, alone.