23 pages • 46 minutes read
Christina Georgina RossettiRemember
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1862A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
“Remember,” with its carefully metered lines and rigidly patterned rhymes, clearly follows the template for a Petrarchan sonnet, a genre of lyrical poetry defined more than four centuries before Rossetti by Italian poet Francesco Petrarcha (1304-1374) in the earliest decades of the Renaissance.“Remember,” structurally and thematically, is a consummate Petrarchan sonnet. Structurally, the poet follows the conventional formal expectations—14 lines of iambic pentameter following the rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA CDD CDC. Thematically, the poem appears to break radically from its own defined literary context but ultimately returns to that template.
For Petrarch, the sonnet, which is Italian for “little song,” was the perfect vehicle for exploring love and the dynamics of affection and yearning. Indeed, across more than 20 years, Petrarch would pen more than 350 sonnets, each a love poem for a woman known to contemporary readers only as Laura. However, given that Petrarch himself had studied for the priesthood, his love sonnets are infused with the aura and elevation of Christian vision, which Rosetti’s sonnet dismisses. The physical attraction between the lovers is palpable and manifested in a variety of cozy intimate gestures, from long conversations to holding hands. In addition, because Petrarch never had so much as a conversation with the woman he worshipped and the classic Petrarchan sonnet centers on unrequited love or lost love, here Rossetti clearly indicates the lovers have met, have established a relationship, and have even planned a future together.
Ultimately, however, the fast-approaching death of the speaker gifts the poem with its most Petrarchan feel: The adjustment to the grief after love is gone aligns with Petrarch’s aching sense of loss and abandonment. That feeling gives the Petrarchan sonnet its signature fusion of ideal love and deep sorrow. If that sort of emotional cataclysm is a symbolic death in Petrarch, for Rossetti it is a very real death.
In so boldly engaging the emotional energy of the Petrarchan sonnet, Rossetti brought to a genre that had been for three centuries historically dominated by men a distinctly feminine perspective, a woman in love, a woman facing the absolute division of her mortality, a woman graciously, selflessly liberating her lover to live fully, completely after her death. In anchoring “Remember” to a distinctly woman’s perspective (most tellingly the moment when the speaker acknowledges “you” are in charge of planning our future), Rossetti offers the radical (at the time) argument that a woman’s heart, with its hungers, its vulnerabilities, and its anxieties, merits elevation to a sonnet.
Historical Context
Why an otherwise generally healthy teenager would write such a lyric meditation that dwells so specifically and so graphically on the reality of death (and decomposition) is to appreciate Rossetti’s historical context. It is a commonplace observation among cultural psychologists that, although every generation, every culture in its own way encounters the reality of mortality, Victorian England was particularly obsessed with death. Across the nearly seven decades that Queen Victoria was on the throne, the fascination with death and the psychology of mourning and the protocols of grief were manifested in new interest in funeral rites and burial rituals, in elaborate cemetery ornamentation, and in the process of coping with death. Death and grief were explored in paintings, in poetry, in novels, some graphically macabre, some more subtly psychological. Given the decline in religious enthusiasm and the reduction of Christianity to more of a social ritual and given the concomitant rise in the sciences, perhaps such fascination is understandable, even inevitable. Without the engaging (and reassuring) premise of the afterlife, if the cosmos was indeed defined (and limited) by what the senses could record, then death becomes an unusually significant event, an ending, absolute on its own terms and unable to be finessed by the pleasant promises of the Christian God.
Given the reality of Britain’s emergence into an industrial superpower during this era, that rise also created social and economic issues that, in turn, exposed the nation’s alarmingly high mortality rates. Industrialization brought with it the exponential rise in the risk of disease, particularly because much of the overpopulated urban England lived in substandard, impoverished conditions. Although medical sciences were beginning to tackle problems with disease and the challenge of disease control, the reality was that for Rossetti’s generation life expectancy barely topped 40 years. A teenager, then, Rossetti had already lived half her life.
Rossetti as poet was far from alone in her fascination with what it means to die, and “Remember” is far from the only evidence of her interest. Widely read in theological speculations and herself a devout Anglican, Rossetti nevertheless uses the sonnet to explore the possibility, heretical in its implications, that after death the soul goes, well, nowhere, save to some vague and silent realm. Death was real to Rossetti’s cultural moment, giving her poem its urgency and its cultural context.
