Remember by Christina Rosetti - Poetry: The Best Words in the Best Order - #BlogchatterA2ZChallenge2021

 REMEMBER

CHRISTINA ROSETTI

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Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far that you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

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The Poet: Christina Rosetti (1830 - 1894)

Christina Rosetti was seen as one of the finest poets of the Victorian Age, along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Though the latter's work was considered more intellectual and political, Rosetti's writing was considered more lyrical, her poems displaying a simplicity that veered towards perfection of tone and form. Later in life, her poems turned devotional as she turned towards faith as her family shifted from Evangelism to Anglo-Catholicism. Themes that recur in her poetry are the inconstancy of human love, the ephemeral nature of human passion, renunciation and the perfection of divine love. Some of the influences in her life were William Blake, George Herbert, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson. 

She was very close to her brother, Dante Charles Gabriel, who was her most helpful critic and found publishers for her. She even posed as Mary for his painting titled 'The Girlhood of Mary Virgin'. 

'Remember' is a sonnet, a poem of grief, where the person being mourned is the one speaking. It was written when Rosetti was just nineteen, and deals with the themes of life, love and death. The poet exhorts her lover to remember her after she goes away into the silent land of death, where he cannot hold her hand any more. Nor can she turn back to bid farewell to him. She asks him to remember her when it is too late to tell her of the future he has painstakingly planned for her with him.

And after she dies, she does not want her death to be a burden on her lover. She would prefer him to forget her and smile rather than remember her and grieve.

The whole poem stresses on the word 'remember' till the last two lines, where ironically, she urges him to forget her, so that he does not feel sad at having lost her. 

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