The Full Text of “Remember”
1Remember me when I am gone away,
2 Gone far away into the silent land;
3 When you can no more hold me by the hand,
4Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
5Remember me when no more day by day
6 You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
7 Only remember me; you understand
8It will be late to counsel then or pray.
9Yet if you should forget me for a while
10 And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
11 For if the darkness and corruption leave
12 A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
13Better by far you should forget and smile
14 Than that you should remember and be sad.
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“Remember” Introduction
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Christina Rossetti's “Remember” is a poem about grief, told not from the perspective of a mourner but rather the person who's to be mourned. In this sonnet, the speaker begs a loved one to remember her after her death—but also not to feel guilty if he forgets her, so long as she's made some permanent mark on his life and he remains happy. The speaker's poignant realism (in the sense of accepting that her beloved may in fact forget about her) engages both with the finality of death and the persistence of love. Rosetti wrote the poem in 1849 at the age of 19, though it was first published in 1862 in her collection Goblin Market and Other Poems.
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“Remember” Summary
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Remember me when I'm no longer around, having gone far away into death's silent land; when you can't hold my hand anymore, and when I can no longer make as if I'm leaving, and then turn back and stay after all. Remember me when you can no longer tell me about all your future plans for us. Just remember me; you understand that it'll be too late then to give me advice or to pray for me. But if you do forget me for a while, and then remember me again later, don't feel bad. Because as long as darkness and rot don't destroy the traces of my thoughts in you, it'll much better for you to forget about me and be happy than to remember me and be sad.
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“Remember” Themes
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Love, Memory, and Grief
In “Remember,” a speaker entreats a loved one to remember her after her death. At the same time, however, the speaker insists that her beloved shouldn’t feel bad about it if he forgets her for a little while: so long as she’s had some permanent influence on him, it’s ultimately better for him to forget about her and be happy than to remember her and be sad. The poem thus explores the poignant push-pull of grief: while the speaker wishes to remain forever with her love in some way, she also doesn’t want her absence to cause him pain. In the end, the poem suggests that what truly matters to her is that she shape her beloved, becoming a part of him through her influence on his life—and in doing so, become a subtle presence rather than a constantly remembered absence.
The first lines cast the speaker’s death in terms of what she and her beloved won’t be able to do any more when she’s dead and the only way they can come in contact is through memory. The speaker first imagines her death as a journey to a “silent land,” a place that takes both her body and her voice away from her love. Here there is no way for them to communicate, to make plans, to help each other, or simply to be with each other. Memory will be all that’s left to the beloved, then, and the speaker insists that he should cling to it.
Yet, soon enough, the speaker later tempers her insistence. If her lover forgets to do this remembering for a while, he shouldn’t feel guilty—so long as she remains present to him in other ways. What really matters to the speaker is that, in her absence, she should remain to her beloved as “a vestige of the thoughts that once I had”—an influencing presence, maybe not recognized, but still alive in the beloved’s mind. As long as she lives on in this way, it’s better for her lover to be happy with her forgotten presence than sad about her remembered absence.
That said, the speaker isn't quite all the way to hoping that her beloved can forget her and be happy without her forever! She imagines him forgetting her only for “a while.” Either through her influence or her memory, she means to be a permanent part of her beloved’s life; what matters is that their connection can outlast death.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Remember”
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Lines 1-2
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;"Remember" begins with simple immediacy, as the speaker addresses her listener with one straightforward demand: remember me when I'm dead. But the way she imagines her death tells readers a lot about why it's so important to her that she be remembered.
Death, to this speaker, is a country. She imagines it as "the silent land," "far away": not just remote, but speechless. No messages can travel to or from this soundless place. Where some might imagine death as a place from which they can watch over their living loved ones, this speaker frames it as a place of complete disconnection.
The anadiplosis of these first lines emphasizes the distance and disconnect of death: the speaker won't just be gone, she'll be "gone away, / Gone far away." Even the way she uses the word "gone" underlines her point. She imagines gone-ness as a state of being: she doesn't say "remember me after I go away," but "when I am gone away," as if her very self will become a vacancy after her death.
These lines make clear that the poem is an apostrophe, a direct address to someone. While the reader doesn't know who this person might be, these first lines create the strong sense that it's someone the speaker feels very closely connected to—so closely connected, in fact, that the thought that he might forget her when death separates them necessitates a whole poem!
The reader may also begin to get some hints about the addressee's identity when they notice that this poem is a Petrarchan sonnet—a form strongly associated with love poetry. (See the "Form" section for more on this.)
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Lines 3-4
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
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Lines 5-6
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd: -
Lines 7-8
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray. -
Lines 9-10
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve: -
Lines 11-14
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
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“Remember” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration is one of the most common poetic devices. Those repeating initial sounds don't turn up that often in day-to-day speech, and therefore often makes a poem feel, well, poetic: heightened and artful. But in "Remember," this effect is fairly low-key, gently emphasizing linked ideas.
For instance, take a look at the alliteration on /h/ sounds in lines 3-4:
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.That /h/ is a gentle sound, and it subtly draws together images of touch and connection: holding hands, half-leaving but then turning back to embrace one's beloved again. The soft, repeated sounds suggest the tender affection between the speaker and her beloved.
There's similarly subtle alliteration on /f/ sounds in lines 9 and 13:
Yet if you should forget me for a while
[...]
Better by far you should forget and smileThis is an even quieter effect than before: the /f/ sounds of the words "for" and "far" are especially discreet, since those words are pretty unobtrusive ones. But the connection between those words makes a difference in meaning: connecting "forget" and "for a while" makes it clear that the speaker isn't imagining being forgotten forever, and connecting "far" and "forget" emphasizes the speaker's insistence that, really, her beloved's happiness is more important than his constant attention to her memory.
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Assonance
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Apostrophe
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Caesura
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Paradox
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Repetition
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Metaphor
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“Remember” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Silent land
- Counsel
- Corruption
- Vestige
Silent land-
While "silent land" could mean different things in different contexts, in this poem it is a metaphor for death.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Remember”
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Form
This poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, a very old form first developed in medieval Italy. This means its 14 lines can be divided into an opening octave (an eight-line stanza) and closing sestet (a six-line stanza). Based on the poem's rhyme scheme (more on that in "Rhyme Scheme"), the sonnet can further be broken down into two quatrains followed by two tercets.
Typically, a sonnet's octave presents some sort of issue or question to which the sestet then responds. Here, in the octave the speaker implores her beloved to remember her, while the sestet then deals with the opposite scenario: the speaker tells her lover what to do should he forget her.
The moment when the speaker has a change of mind or heart, or introduces a new idea, is called the volta, and in Petrarchan sonnets this usually appears in the first line of the sestet. In this poem, the volta thus turns up exactly where readers would expect it, with the telling word "Yet" in line 9. Finally, sonnets are most commonly associated with love poetry—a tradition this poem fits right into.
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Meter
This poem is a sonnet, and therefore uses iambic pentameter: a line of five iambs, the metrical foot that goes da-DUM. In context, that sounds like this:
Remem- | ber me | when I | am gone | away,
As many readers have remarked, iambic pentameter sounds a lot like a heartbeat. A sonnet's iambic pentameter is thus perfectly matched to a poem about love and death—both of which have a lot to do with how and whether someone's heart is beating.
The iambic pentameter here isn't perfectly regular, however. Take a look at line 7, which begins with a trochee (DUM-da) rather than an iamb (da-DUM):
Only | remem- | ber me [...]
The same thing happens again in line 13:
Better | by far | you should | forget | and smile
In both of these lines, the shift of emphasis to the front of the first word makes the speaker sound insistent: she's really leaning on these words, making sure her beloved hears and understands her.
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Rhyme Scheme
This poem uses the traditional rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet—or rather, one of several possible variations on that rhyme scheme. Petrarchan sonnets typically start out with pretty regular rhymes, and get a little more complicated in their second halves; this poem is no exception. The rhyme scheme here runs like this:
ABBA ABBA CDD ECE
This movement from the balanced ABBA pattern to the more complicated variation between C, D, and E rhymes in the second part mirrors the poem's thought. Just as the speaker starts out insisting on one thing—that her beloved should remember her—and then moves into the more difficult thought that her beloved shouldn't feel bad if he forgets her for a while, the rhyme scheme starts out simple and regular and gets knottier.
The vast majority of the rhymes here are on plain, monosyllabic words: land and hand, day and pray, grieve and leave. This simplicity makes the poem feel both sweet and forceful. That last E rhyme, had and sad, isn't dramatic or flowery: it's just plain and poignant. That the speaker only uses those E rhymes in the last few lines of the poem makes their effect even stronger.
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“Remember” Speaker
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While we're calling the speaker "she" and the addressee "he" in this guide, the poem itself doesn't give readers even that much information about its characters. The reader can know only this much of the speaker: this is a person who's both passionate and realistic. While she longs to be remembered by the beloved person she's speaking to, she also understands human frailty, and knows that although memory isn't perfect, people can have a deep influence on each other even after they're forgotten.
There's a curious strength in this speaker's willingness to admit that, as much as she longs to be remembered, she might not get exactly what she wants. The speaker also comes across as profoundly loving: she's selfless enough to feel that it's better for her beloved to be happy than sad. But she doesn't pretend to be so selfless that she wants her lover to be happy and forgetful right away or all the time. Her truthfulness is part of her complex and honest understanding of love and grief.
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“Remember” Setting
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There's no concrete setting in this poem, but the speaker indirectly evokes the different worlds of the living and the dead. She calls death "the silent land," emphasizing the way that death prevents communication; only through memory and thought (or, indeed, through art like this very poem, which may record both memory and thought) can the dead speak to the living. The world of the living is physical; the "silent land" is isolated, intangible, and mysterious.
The land of the dead is also a place of "darkness and corruption": there doesn't seem to be much thought of a happy afterlife here. The "silent land," whatever it is, doesn't seem to be a place from which the speaker will look down on her beloved twanging a harp. Memory is so important to this speaker because the "silent land" will keep her and her beloved completely apart.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Remember”
Literary Context
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was an important Victorian poet, and she spent her life at the heart of her contemporary cultural world. The daughter of an artistic Italian family (her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti was also a well-known poet and painter), Rossetti was born in England, and grew up surrounded by poetry and art. She began her own career young; she wrote "Remember" when she was only 19.
Rossetti, unlike many poets, was popular and well-known in her lifetime. Her long poem "Goblin Market" started a Victorian vogue for rather sinister fairy tales. She was also a noted early feminist figure, and many of her poems deal with the complexities of women's lives in a restrictive society. Frequent illnesses meant Rossetti turned much of her energy inward, and her rich-but-tormented emotional life colors much of her work.
Rossetti was influenced by Elizabeth Barrett Browning—another popular female poet with strong ties to Italy—and some of her contemporaries saw her as the older poet's natural successor. She was also connected to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the artistic school of which her brother Dante Gabriel was a founding member. Her father's work as a scholar of Italian literature meant she was exposed at an early age to the great Italian poets Dante and Petrarch, whose influence may be seen in her fondness for the Italian sonnet form.
Rossetti's reputation as a brilliant lyrical poet has never tarnished, and she's still much-studied today. Her poetry has been a major influence on writers from Virginia Woolf to Philip Larkin.
Historical Context
Christina Rossetti lived in a world marked both by revolutionary change and reactionary conservatism. The Victorians were innovators and empire-builders, and England reshaped itself considerably under the reign of Victoria, its first truly powerful queen since Elizabeth I. A primarily rural population made an unprecedented shift to the cities as factory work outpaced farm work, and writers from Dickens to Hardy worried about the human effects of this kind of change.
Perhaps in response to this speedy reconfiguration of the world, Victorian social culture became deeply conservative. Women were expected to adhere to a strict code of sexual morals: a woman must be chaste, pliant, and submissive, and any deviation could mean social exile. But within this repressive landscape, women writers began to flourish, asserting the complexity and meaningfulness of their own lives. Rossetti's work was part of a tide of bold and moving poetry and fiction by Victorian women; Charlotte and Emily Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are only a few of the writers whose work achieved contemporary recognition against the odds.
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More “Remember” Resources
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External Resources
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More on Rossetti's Life and Work — A short biography and links to more of Rossetti's poems from the Poetry Foundation.
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A Reading of the Poem — Listen to the actor Mairin O'Hagan perform the poem aloud.
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Gender and Power in Rossetti's Work — An article on Christina Rossetti's influence as a feminist thinker.
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Portraits of Rossetti — A selection of portraits of Rossetti from London's National Portrait Gallery. Some depict her with her artistic family, and some are by a member of her artistic family—namely her brother, the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
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The Poem's Manuscript — See pictures of the poem in Rossetti's own handwriting.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Christina Rossetti
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