The Full Text of “Song (When I am dead, my dearest)”
1When I am dead, my dearest,
2Sing no sad songs for me;
3Plant thou no roses at my head,
4Nor shady cypress tree:
5Be the green grass above me
6With showers and dewdrops wet;
7And if thou wilt, remember,
8And if thou wilt, forget.
9I shall not see the shadows,
10I shall not feel the rain;
11I shall not hear the nightingale
12Sing on, as if in pain:
13And dreaming through the twilight
14That doth not rise nor set,
15Haply I may remember,
16And haply may forget.
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“Song (When I am dead, my dearest)” Introduction
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The Victorian poet Christina Rossetti wrote "Song (When I am dead, my dearest)" in 1848 at the age of 18, though it wasn't published until 1862 in her collection Goblin Market and Other Poems. The poem focuses on death and mourning, with the speaker urging a loved one not to waste too much time grieving for her when she dies. Instead, the speaker tells this person to move on with life: while the speaker isn't exactly sure what happens after death, she does seem sure that she won't notice whether or not the living remember her.
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“Song (When I am dead, my dearest)” Summary
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When I'm no longer alive, my darling, don't sing any sorrowful songs for me. Don't plant any roses or shade-giving cypress trees by my headstone. Just let the grass be green above me, and wet with rain and dew. And if you remember me, then remember me. And if you forget me, then forget me.
I won't see the gloominess. I won't feel the rain. I won't hear the nightingale singing as if it were hurting. When I'm dreaming in that half-light of death, which that doesn't grow brighter or fade into darkness, maybe I'll remember, and maybe I'll forget.
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“Song (When I am dead, my dearest)” Themes
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Love, Death, and Mourning
The speaker of “When I Am Dead, My Dearest” tells a loved one not to worry about remembering her after she has died, because she won’t be able to tell the difference: in death, the speaker says, she will be far removed from the concerns of this world, with no awareness as to whether or not her "dearest" mourns her. The speaker isn’t even sure if she will remember her beloved in the mysterious “twilight” of death. For this speaker, the usual ceremonies around death and grieving are done more for the living than the dead—on whom there’s simply no point in wasting too much energy.
The poem begins with the speaker addressing a loved one who would mourn her if she were to die. With a striking lack of sentimentality, the speaker instructs this person not to grieve her when the time comes. This person should “Sing no sad songs” to mark the speaker’s passing, nor plant “roses” and “cypress tree[s]” (plants often planted to commemorate the dead) by the speaker’s grave.
Instead, all the speaker needs above her grave is green grass, wet with rain and dew. In other words, nothing special! This growing grass reflects the natural world moving on above the speaker's grave, unaffected by her passing. Symbolically, it also suggests that the speaker hopes her beloved will likewise move on—that this person will focus on living rather than on mourning the dead.
The speaker goes on to say that whether she’s remembered or forgotten doesn’t really matter, given that she won’t be around to notice. After death, the speaker will no longer “see the shadows,” “feel the rain,” nor “hear the nightingale” singing.
Whether this is because her spirit will have moved on to better things or because she has simply ceased to exist, the speaker doesn't anticipate a lingering attachment to this world. Instead, the speaker imagines death as “dreaming through [a] twilight / That doth not rise nor set”—a kind of eternal sleep, in which she’ll be unaware of what’s happening on earth.
The speaker also doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to remember life on earth while in this endless slumber. The speaker ends the poem by saying they may “Haply [...] remember” or “haply [...] forget” the things that happened while she was alive. The word “haply,” which means by chance or luck, implies that the speaker isn’t sure what will become of her own memories after she dies. In a sense, she’s telling her beloved that it’s okay to forget her without knowing for certain that the forgetting will be mutual.
The poem ultimately suggests that the mysteriousness of death justifies not wasting what little time one has on earth. It’s important not to expend too much energy on those who won't be around to appreciate it.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Song (When I am dead, my dearest)”
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Lines 1-2
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;The poem begins with the speaker addressing someone "dear[]" to her. (Note that the speaker doesn't need to be interpreted as a woman, but for clarity's sake, we will be referred to as "she/her" throughout the guide).
This loved one, the speaker says, should "Sing no sad songs" in the event of the speaker's death. It isn't clear why the speaker is thinking about death, but what is immediately clear is her lack of sentimentality on the subject. She doesn't want her loved one to feel obligated to mourn her.
Ironically enough, the speaker uses a song to implore her "dearest" not to sing for her once she's died, almost as if she is mourning her own death in advance. Perhaps, then, she is a little sentimental after all!
Given that this poem is a "song," it makes sense that its language is rhythmic and musical. These lines are written in ballad meter, a bouncy meter made up of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter (four iambs, feet with a da-DUM rhythm, per line) and trimeter (three iambs per line):
When I | am dead, | my dearest,
Sing no | sad songs | for me;The meter isn't totally regular, however, as readers can see right away here. For one thing, the speaker leaves off the final stressed beat in line 1, a variation she will return to throughout the poem. Still, there's a clear, steady rhythm to these lines.
The consonance and more specific sibilance of these lines add yet more music still. Note all the repeated /s/, /d/, /m/, and /ng/ sounds:
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me; -
Lines 3-6
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
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Lines 7-8
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget. -
Lines 9-12
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain: -
Lines 13-14
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set, -
Lines 15-16
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
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“Song (When I am dead, my dearest)” Symbols
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Roses and the Cypress Tree
The roses and cypress trees in the poem symbolize traditional mourning—the typical ways in which the living go about commemorating the dead.
This symbolism has deep roots: the ancient Greeks and Romans associated the cypress tree with death because of its inability to regrow if cut back too much, and it's one of the most common trees planted in cemeteries across European and Muslim countries. Roses, of course, are linked with love and are often placed at loved ones' headstones.
Importantly, roses and cypress trees are also alive. In a way, then, they also represent the idea that the mourning rituals people partake cannot reach the dead. Such rituals stem from the world of the living, and are done for the living themselves.
That's why the speaker of this poem asks that she not be mourned with roses and cypress trees. As far as she can see, there's no point in these rituals because once she's dead, she won't be around to appreciate them. She would rather her loved one move on, regardless of whether that means remembering or forgetting their time together.
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Green Grass
The "green grass" here symbolizes the way that life carries on in the face of death. Such grass will grow and thrive above the speaker's grave, and this speaks to the way that the world will keep on turning after the speaker dies.
The grass, then, is also a symbol of what the speaker hopes for her beloved: that this person will continue to grow and flourish in her absence.
The color green itself often symbolizes youth, spring, and rebirth. Perhaps, then, the green grass here further suggests that the speaker will be reborn in some way, existing in some kind of afterlife where she may or may not remember her time on earth (or simply that her body will nourish the ground on which the grass grows).
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The Nightingale
The nightingale (a kind of songbird) has been a symbol of lament (a passionate expression of grief, sorrow, or mourning) in classical literature since the ancient Greeks first associated it with Philomela.
According to myth, Philomela was a princess of Athens who was raped by her sister's husband, King Tereus of Thrace. When she threatened to tell everyone about his crime, Tereus cut out her tongue. Later, she exacted revenge on him (there are many variations of this part of the story), and when he came after her in a rage, the gods turned Philomela into a nightingale so that she could his wrath.
In this poem, the speaker says that once she is dead, she will no longer hear the nightingale's lament. On the surface, this paints death as a kind of relief from the pain and sorrow of this world. Yet, at the same time, the nightingale's song is also renowned for its beauty. It commonly represents not just sorrow, but also the beauty of nature and the artistry of poets. As such, the nightingale in this poem is a symbol of all the things the dead can no longer feel once they are gone: sadness and beauty and sorrow and joy.
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“Song (When I am dead, my dearest)” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Anaphora
The speaker uses frequent parallelism and anaphora (which is a specific kind of parallelism) in order to build her argument.
Take lines 2-3, for example, which follow the same general structure as the speaker tells her beloved not to do something mourning-related on her behalf:
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,That parallelism makes the lines feel all the more insistent: the speaker isn't being coy, but truly doesn't want her "dearest" to do these things.
Lines 7-8 contain more parallelism, as the speaker repeats the phrase "And if though wilt" at the start of each (an example of anaphora):
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.This anaphora draws attention to the repeated phrase, emphasizing the fact that the speaker doesn't care so much whether or not her loved one remembers or forgets her; what she cares about is that this person does what is best for them. Their "wil[l]," or choice, is what matters to her.
The next three lines feature yet more anaphora and parallelism. The speaker opens each line with the statement "I shall not," which is then followed by a sensory verb ("see"/"feel"/"hear") and a noun drawn from the natural world:
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingaleThe repetition of "I shall not" again feels insistent; the speaker is trying to convince her loved one that she won't be around to notice anything that they do after she dies. These lines also reiterate the sense of disconnection that the speaker believes is part of death. Her earthly senses won't be working.
Finally, the poem echoes the first stanza's closing lines in those of the second. Again, the speaker opens each line with a repeating phrase ("Haply I may"/haply may"). Like "And if thou wilt" from the first stanza, this phrase implies that forgetting/remembering isn't entirely within the speaker's control, and thus not worth worrying about: maybe she'll remember, and maybe she won't—she just doesn't know!
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Consonance
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Alliteration
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Imagery
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Metaphor
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Allusion
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“Song (When I am dead, my dearest)” 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.
- Thou
- Cypress tree
- Dewdrops
- Wilt
- Nightingale
- Doth
- Haply
Thou-
An archaic form of the word "you."
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Song (When I am dead, my dearest)”
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Form
The poem is made up of two octaves, or eight-line stanzas. These can be further broken up into quatrains (four-line stanzas) based on their rhyme scheme (each set of four lines follows an ABCB pattern).
The lines also predictably vary in length: odd-numbered lines are generally a syllable or two longer than even-numbered lines. As such, readers might consider these to be loose ballad stanzas (four-line stanzas with ABCB rhyme schemes and alternating lines of eight and six syllables). This makes sense, given that the poem is a "song": ballads were often set to music.
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Meter
The poem is written in loose ballad meter (a.k.a. a less strict version of common meter). Odd-numbered lines use iambic tetrameter (four iambs, da-DUMs, per line) and even-numbered lines use iambic trimeter (three iambs per line). This meter is common in church hymns and adds to the musical feeling of this poem.
The meter isn't strict, however, as readers can see from the getgo:
When I | am dead, | my dear- | est,
The poem starts out in a clear iambic rhythm, but it's missing its final expected stressed beat (the line has seven syllables instead of eight). In fact, there are only two odd-numbered lines in the poem that are true tetrameter: lines 3 and 11. (As such, the meter is something called catalectic iambic tetrameter here—which just means that the lines are missing their final beats.)
The speaker also plays with the placement of stressed beats. While line 2 has the expected six syllables of an iambic trimeter line, readers might hear a stress on that third beat (creating a foot called a spondee):
Sing no | sad songs | for me;
Readers might even hear a stress on that initial "Sing," adding yet more force to the speaker's instructions. The same thing happens in line 5:
Be the | green grass | above | me
The first foot here is a trochee (DUM-da) followed by another spondee (and, like line 1, there's no final stressed beat here).
Moments like this add emphasis to the speaker's commands, granting the poem a sense of confidence and authority even as the speaker is asking for something quite untraditional: to be unmourned after she dies.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem has a specific rhyme scheme associated with ballads. Each quatrain, or four-line stanza, rhymes:
ABCB
In other words, even lines rhyme with each other, while odd lines don't rhyme at all. In the first stanza, this means that "me" in line 2 rhymes with "tree" in line 4, and "wet" in line 6 rhymes with "forget" in line 8. These rhymes add musicality to the poem, making it all the more memorable and song-like.
It's also worth noting that, despite being a short poem, the speaker repeats a rhyme word: "forget." The repetition of this word at the end of both stanzas emphasizes the possibility of forgetting over remembering. It seems the speaker doesn't really imagine that she'll feel too attached to this world after she has died, and for this reason, she doesn't expect her loved one to spend too much time missing her.
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“Song (When I am dead, my dearest)” Speaker
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The speaker is someone who is imagining her own death and imploring a loved one not to mourn her when the times comes. She believes that she won't be around to appreciate the gestures of the living, and that the living have their own lives on which they ought to focus (seeing as their time on earth is also limited).
The poem doesn't tell readers anything about the speaker's age, gender, health, etc., which makes the poem's message feel universal: anyone considering their own mortality might identify with it.
That said, it's worth noting the similarities between the speaker and the poet. Rossetti spent most of her life struggling with illness and had reason to contemplate her own mortality from a young age. She was only 18 years old when she penned this poem; by the time she wrote "Remember" a year later, a poem which deals with very similar themes, her attitude towards being remembered or forgotten after death seems to have deepened, though her general argument remains the same.
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“Song (When I am dead, my dearest)” Setting
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In a way, the poem is set in the speaker's imagination: she's looking ahead to a time when she has passed from this earth. In this imagined future, the speaker wants her loved one to carry on with life and not bother with "plant[ing] roses" or "cypress tree[s]" at her headstone. As far as she's concerned, the "green grass" that will continue to grow above her body and the rain that falls on her plot of earth is enough.
She goes on to imagine a setting that she herself will not be able to "see," "feel," or "hear": she describes "shadows" and "rain" and a singing "nightingale," a kind of songbird, all of which she will be unaware. Instead, she will be "dreaming through [a] twilight / That doth not rise or set." In other words, she will be asleep to the world; regardless of whether or not she is able to remember it, she won't be able to experience it.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Song (When I am dead, my dearest)”
Literary Context
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was well-known in her lifetime, a rarity for poets, and particularly rare for a woman in Victorian England.
She began writing at an early age, finishing "Song (When I am dead, my dearest)" when she was only 18. A year later, Rossetti would revisit themes of death and mourning in her poem “Remember." In this second poem, she again urges a loved one not to worry too much about forgetting her after her death. Both poems would later appear in her first collection, “Goblin Market and Other Poems,” which was published in 1862.
Many of Rosetti's poems focus on mortality, religious devotion, and the complexities of women’s lives in a conservative Victorian society. She has often been compared to her predecessor Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose work shares some similarities with Rossetti's. However, Rossetti’s work is generally considered to be less political and simpler in its language and expression of ideas. Other influences include Dante and Petrarch (her father’s ties to Italy meant that she was well-schooled in Italian forms such as the Petrarchan sonnet), the Bible, and fairy tales and folklore.
Many of Rosetti's early poems were also imitations of other poets’ work, and “Song” has often been compared to John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” particularly in its attitude towards mourning. Its ideas also resemble some of those presented in John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale."
Rossetti wrote more than a dozen books over her lifetime. There was a resurgence of critical interest in her work towards the end of the 20th century as feminist scholars took interest in it. Part of her mass appeal has been what her brother, the famed Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, described as her talent for “artless art”—that is, art that appears simple and uncontrived on the surface, but which is effective, moving, and nuanced when readers dig deeper.
Historical Context
In 1843 Rossetti's father became ill and was unable to continue teaching and supporting the family. Rosetti was left at home to take care of her father, though she herself fell ill in 1845. This illness was diagnosed as a heart condition at the time, though a different doctor believed her symptoms were psychosomatic and that she was dealing with mental illness. In any case, according to her brother William in a posthumous preface to her poetry, she went from being a vivacious and passionate girl to a formal, controlled, and restrained adult.
Poems like “Song” and “Remember” reveal Rossetti’s preoccupation with her poor health and her fear that she would die an early death. But she also lived in a world that was defined by drastic, revolutionary change and the conservative backlash that followed.
England reinvented itself under Queen Victoria, and while this time period prompted a great deal of expansion and innovation, it also saw the return to traditional family values. Women were expected to conform to strict expectations regarding everything from education to sexuality and marriage. In spite of—or, perhaps, in reaction to—these restrictive norms, female writers such as Rosetti began to write about (and receive popular and critical recognition for) their own lives, affirming the importance and meaningfulness of women’s experiences.
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More “Song (When I am dead, my dearest)” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Read Aloud — The poem as performed by Mairin O'Hagan.
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Goblin Market — Scans of the second edition of Rossetti's collection Goblin Market, in which this poem originally appeared, from the British Library.
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Rosetti's Life and Work — A biography of Christina Rossetti and additional poems from the Poetry Foundation.
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A Musical Arrangement of the Poem — "Song (When I am dead, my dearest)" as arranged by Saskia Kusrahadianti, one of many musical performances of the poem.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Christina Rossetti
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