23 pages • 46 minutes read
Remember
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Literary Devices
Form
“Remember” is an expression of a Petrarchan sonnet. An autodidact in the literatures of Antiquity and the High Renaissance and a member of a family that was extraordinary in its devotion to the arts and to literature, Rossetti, just in her teens, understood the mechanics of a Petrarchan sonnet. The 14 lines, standard in a sonnet, are divided into two sections: the first eight lines, termed the octave, set the basic situation and raise a critical question, which is then answered in the sonnet’s closing six lines, termed the sestet.
In Rossetti’s Petrarchan sonnet, the octave introduces the basic premise: how will the speaker’s lover adjust to her death? The poet offers her response. The octave reveals the speaker’s expectations: remember me. Over the octave, the speaker reiterates her request through amplifying her relationship with her lover, pointing out their intimate conversations, holding hands, and their poignant, bittersweet goodbyes whenever they have had to part. These things, the speaker demands, never forget. Hence the octave sets the problem: the speaker does not recognize, much less admit either the desperation of her plea or the selfishness of her expectations.
The repetition of the phrase “Remember be” in quick succession (Lines 1, 5, 7), a poetic device known as anaphora, creates the feeling of growing anxiety. The sestet, beginning with Line 9, responds to the dilemma of the octave in having the speaker come to terms with death and, in turn, releasing her lover from any expectation that he will maroon his heart in his grief. Of course, the sestet is emotionally painful for the speaker, admitting as she must that she is too soon to be a corpse. In turn, she sees the endgame of expecting her lover to die, symbolically, at least. It is the sestet that introduces forthrightly the reasonable position: let me be your occasional memory. That concession, rather than the obsession the speaker offers in the problematic octave, offers the sestet’s solution. Thus, the sestet resolves the problem the octave creates: obsession is not love but neither is forgetting.
Meter
Rossetti’s sonnet follows the expected traditional metrical patterns of a Petrarchan sonnet. Each line is set to iambic pentameter. The lines are each executed in pairs of unstressed/stressed sounds, five such beat units to each line. For instance:
Remember me when no more day by day (Line 5)
Reflecting perhaps that Rossetti was still an apprentice poet, the lines reflect little variation or subtle iterations in that steady meter lines. Although such regularity sacrifices sonic variety and tends to lend itself to decidedly unimaginative recitation, the constant meter might in fact be deliberate: the steady percussive rhythm of each line suggesting a stout and strong heartbeat that beats despite the poem’s lugubrious subject matter. The steady meter further reflects the speaker’s resolute defiance, her commitment to living until she cannot. In addition, the poem uses the device known as enjambment, that is the continuation of an idea from one line to the next without using end punctation. The end-marks, however, alternate between closing off the end lines and allowing free movement to the next, that metrical syncopation giving the poem a feeling of coming and going, a metrical pattern that reflects the speaker’s own hesitant movement toward death.
The metrical patterns are additionally reenforced by the rhyme scheme of a conventional Petrarchan sonnet. In the octave the lines rhyme ABBA ABBA; in the sestet, CDC CDC. From a metrical stand, then, the sonnet is a carefully timed, carefully rhymed poem. In a poem about a growing anxiety over the absoluteness of death and how best to say a final farewell, that rigidly measured meter provides a reassuring sense that, yes, the heart is full riot mode, confused and anxious, but it refuses to concede to the curve of chaos. Thus, the meter itself helps contain, direct, and control the anxiety over death as the poet moves toward that touching closing sentiment. The meter reassures that the poet is in control.
Voice
Although there is little biographical evidence to make the claim airtight, the voice heard through the poem is assumed to be Christina Rossetti herself, a poet, despite the reality that, still a teenager, she was not preparing to die and that during the most likely time for the poem’s composition she had already broken off an engagement and hence would not be saying farewell to a lover even if she were dying.
The voice seems to be the poet’s own because of the nature of the intimacies revealed in the poem. The poet talks forthrightly about her love, about how she longs for her lover when they are apart, and, as the sonnet unfolds, she shares her private fears over the absoluteness of the death and the reality of corruption that she is facing. The first-person voice further enhances that sense of shared intimacy, the tone of confession. The premise of the poem—a poet addressing an unnamed lover—offers the pronouns in direct reference—the you—to refer as much to the reader, catapulting across the typical division between writer/reader and creating an immediacy to the voice, which in turn creates a coaxing sympathy.
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