“I Remember, I Remember” Summary

• I remember the house I was born in, with the little window where the morning sun peeked in. Back then, the sun never seemed to rise too early, and the day never seemed too long. But these days, I often wish I'd died during the night!

  I remember the red and white roses, the violets, and the lilies—flowers that seemed to be made of light. I remember the lilac bush where the robins nested, and the place where my brother planted the laburnum tree on his birthday; it's still growing today!

  I remember where I used to play on the swing; I felt sure that the air rushing past me must feel just as fresh to swooping swallows. My soul seemed to be a bird then, but now it's weighed down—and even a summer swim couldn't cool my feverish forehead!

  I remember the tall fir trees; I used to believe their tops nearly touched the sky. That was just childish foolishness. But now that I'm an adult, it doesn't give me much pleasure to know that heaven is farther away than I believed it was when I was little.

“I Remember, I Remember” Themes

• 

  Nostalgia for the Joy of Childhood

  The speaker of “I Remember, I Remember” looks back with mingled love and pain at the days of his childhood. When he was a child, he remembers, he felt in tune with the world around him, loved the beauty of nature, and took delight in every day. Adulthood, alas, doesn’t feel like that at all. To a sad or suffering adult, this poem suggests, the innocent freedom of childhood can look like a lost paradise; growing up seems to mean all loss and little reward.

  In this speaker’s memory, childhood might as well have been an eternal summer holiday. The “roses,” “vi’lets” (violets), and “lily-cups” (lilies) were always in bloom; the days always felt just the right length; and riding a swing, the speaker felt as if his “spirit flew in feathers” like a swallow. He delighted in the natural world around him and greeted every day with joy. (The speaker is idealizing his youth here: it couldn’t always have been a blissful summer day when he was a boy, after all. Nonetheless, he's capturing something important about a kind of joy he only felt as a child.)

  As an adult, by contrast, the speaker’s soul feels anything but feather-light. He’s “heavy” with worries, there’s a “fever on [his] brow,” and he often wishes that he’d just die in the night so he wouldn’t have to face the morning. Looking back on his youth, he feels a melancholy, bittersweet nostalgia for a time when he was joyfully in tune with the world around him and unburdened by cares. For this speaker, being a child meant living a life of freedom, exhilaration, and easy joy—and adulthood feels like getting kicked out of paradise.

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• 

  Children's Connection to Nature

  This poem takes a very capital-R Romantic view of childhood, suggesting that children are closely in tune with nature—and thus closely in tune with the divine. Like Thomas Hood’s contemporary William Wordsworth, this poem’s speaker feels that children, through their connection to the natural world, can reach toward “heav’n” in a way that adults can’t.

  The speaker remembers that, in his boyhood, he once believed that the “fir trees” around his childhood home were “close against the sky”: that is, that they almost touched the sky. As an adult, he knows that this was just “childish ignorance.” But he also wishes that he could still be so blissfully ignorant. Now that he knows that the sky isn’t just a blue roof, so close you can almost touch it, he feels “farther off from heav’n” both literally and figuratively. To a child, these words suggest, heaven itself seems within arm’s reach.

  Part of children's closeness to heaven, in this speaker’s view, comes from their instinctive delight in nature. When he was a boy, the speaker remembers, he saw the sun as a friend, relished the intense colors of the flowers, and felt that he must know how the swallows feel when he rode on his swing. In fact, almost all of his memories of childhood have to do with reveling in the beauty of the natural world. Such an easy relish of nature, the poem suggests, allows children to feel that this world might indeed be pretty close to “heav’n.”

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “I Remember, I Remember”

• Lines 1-8

  I remember, I remember,
  The house where I was born,
  The little window where the sun
  Came peeping in at morn;
  He never came a wink too soon,
  Nor brought too long a day,
  But now, I often wish the night
  Had borne my breath away!

  The poem begins with a fond reminiscence of the speaker’s childhood home: “I remember, I remember, / The house where I was born” he begins, his rhythmic epizeuxis working like a spell to carry him into his memories.

  In particular, he remembers the mornings, when the sun came “peeping in” his “little window” to wake him up. Back then, he suggests, he felt like the sun was a friend. He personifies the sun as he describes its thoughtfulness: “He never came a wink too soon, / Nor brought too long a day." The young speaker and his pal the sun were perfectly in agreement about life, it seems. Under this sun’s friendly guidance, mornings were always welcome, and days never dragged out too long.

  The little speaker and the early sun might have been in tune in a different way, too: both were morning creatures, symbolically speaking. The speaker is remembering a time in the morning of his life, when he wasn’t just friendly with the morning sun but also like the morning sun, at the very beginning of his life's journey.

  Already, readers might get the sense that this lovely relationship with the sun—and thus, with the passing of time—hasn’t lasted into the speaker’s adulthood. Even by raising the idea that the sun could “bring too long a day,” the speaker implies that, since then, he’s run into days that feel far too long.

  In fact, some of the speaker’s days might feel almost unendurable. He closes this stanza with an abrupt change of tone, confiding that, these days, he often wishes that “the night / Had borne my breath away!” He sometimes wishes, in other words, that he might just die in the night and not have to endure yet another sunrise and yet another day. (The blunt /b/ alliteration of "borne my breath away" adds extra punch to this painful idea.) Things have changed since childhood, then. This sharp, sad juxtaposition between youthful mornings of happiness and adult nights of misery will lie at the heart of this poem.

  The speaker will deliver his sad reflections in octaves (eight-line stanzas) written in a variation on common meter:

  • In common meter, lines of iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “He nev- | er came | a wink | too soon”) alternate with lines of iambic trimeter (lines of three iambs, as in “The house | where I | was born”).
  • This poem's stanzas almost follow that rhythm. But the echoing first line—“I remember, I remember”—falls into a different, dreamier pattern, with just two strong stresses: “I remember, I remember.”
  • That quiet opening line fittingly stands apart from the speaker’s descriptions of his childhood—just as he must stand apart from his memories, unable to return to his youthful happiness.

• Lines 9-16

  I remember, I remember,
  The roses, red and white,
  The vi'lets, and the lily-cups,
  Those flowers made of light!
  The lilacs where the robin built,
  And where my brother set
  The laburnum on his birthday,—
  The tree is living yet!

  

  

  

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• Lines 17-24

  I remember, I remember,
  Where I was used to swing,
  And thought the air must rush as fresh
  To swallows on the wing;
  My spirit flew in feathers then,
  That is so heavy now,
  And summer pools could hardly cool
  The fever on my brow!

  

  

  

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• Lines 25-32

  I remember, I remember,
  The fir trees dark and high;
  I used to think their slender tops
  Were close against the sky:
  It was a childish ignorance,
  But now 'tis little joy
  To know I'm farther off from heav'n
  Than when I was a boy.

  

  

  

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“I Remember, I Remember” Symbols

• 

  Summer

  The sights and sounds of summer symbolize childhood and its joys. When the speaker looks back on his youth, he seems to feel as if he never lived in any month but mid-June. The sun always shone bright; the roses, lilies, and violets were always in bloom; the swallows were always on the wing. What’s more, the speaker felt attuned to these natural beauties. He and the sun always seemed to agree about when was the right time for the day to begin and end, and the swallows and his “spirit” alike “flew in feathers.”

  Childhood was, in other words, the happy summer of the speaker’s life, a time when just to be alive felt like having the best imaginable sunny day out in the garden. By connecting his childhood so insistently to the summer, the speaker implies that he’s in a very different season of life now: adulthood, by extension, must mean autumn and winter, chilly times of loss.

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• 

  The Fir Trees

  Most of the plants that the speaker describes in this poem only blossom in the warm months: roses, violets, lilacs, and lilies are all summer flowers. At the end of the poem, however, he remembers the "fir trees" that grew around his home. When the speaker was little, he recalls, he thought that the fir trees might reach all the way up to "heav'n." This image of trees brushing up against the sky represents how close the speaker felt to heaven as a child—how heavenly childhood itself was in the speaker's young eyes. Now, however, the speaker sees this idea as only "childish ignorance." The loss of this belief about the fir trees reflects the loss of that childhood ignorance, but also the loss of blissful childhood innocence. As an adult, he feels "farther off" from heaven than he did as a child.

  At the same time, those evergreen trees, which stay just the same year-round, might symbolically suggest eternity, subtly counterbalancing the poem's nostalgic sadness. By introducing an image of trees that traditionally symbolize eternal life—and associating those trees with heaven—the poem hints that nature might still offer the speaker hope for heavenly consolation, even if the summer of his life is lost.

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“I Remember, I Remember” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Repetition

  The poem’s repetitions bring its themes of nostalgia and memory to center stage, starting from the very first line: “I remember, I remember.” The epizeuxis on those words helps to capture what memory feels like: the speaker uses an echoing phrasing to describe an echoing experience. This epizeuxis might also suggest a certain relentlessness in the speaker’s memories. Maybe he isn’t trying to think fondly back on his childhood so much as he’s being helplessly carried back into his memories of those happier days.

  That sense of helplessness only gets stronger when this already repetitive phrase becomes a refrain. Every stanza of the poem begins with those same two words, keeping memory always in front of the speaker’s (and the reader’s) eyes. Remembering childhood, all these repetitions suggest, might be just as painful as it’s comforting: the chant-like repetition of “I remember, I remember” hints that the speaker can’t look away from thoughts of happier days.

  Perhaps these repetitions also invite readers to wonder what the speaker doesn’t remember. Childhood isn’t all one long summer day, after all. The speaker’s idealized picture of the past leaves out school, head lice, and going to bed while the sun’s still up.

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• Metaphor

  

  

  

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• Juxtaposition

  

  

  

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• Alliteration

  

  

  

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“I Remember, I 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.

• At morn
• Borne
• Vi'lets
• Lily-cups
• Set
• Laburnum
• Where I was used to swing
• 'Tis

• In the morning.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “I Remember, I Remember”

• Form

  “I Remember, I Remember” is divided into four octaves (or eight-line stanzas), each framing a particular memory of the speaker’s childhood home: his bedroom window, the flowers in the garden, the swing, the tall fir trees. Every stanza uses an alternating ABCB DEFE rhyme scheme that breaks it down into two four-line parts:

  • The first section fondly describes the speaker’s boyhood joys.
  • The second introduces the speaker’s adult experience, usually setting up an unhappy juxtaposition: his once birdlike soul is “heavy” now, the mornings he used to greet so happily now begin days that drag out for “too long.”

  Maybe the poem’s most distinctive formal feature is its refrain: the “I remember, I remember” that begins every stanza. Those repeated words feel almost like a spell the speaker recites to bring his happier days back to his mind. Or perhaps they suggest his powerlessness in the face of his memories: he can’t help but remember those better days now that he’s living out his unhappy adulthood.

  The rhythm of this refrain cuts across the poem’s meter. For the most part, the poem uses a variation on common meter, a meter that uses alternating lines of iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “He nev- | er came | a wink | too soon”) and iambic trimeter (lines of three iambs, as in “The house | where I | was born”). This rhythm is indeed common: it turns up in a lot of old ballads and folk songs. But the muttery, dithery, mostly unstressed rhythms of “I remember, I remember” don’t quite fit into that pattern.

  Perhaps the contrast helps to underscore one of the speaker’s feelings: remembering the past and being able to reclaim the past are very different things. He can’t get back into the swing of his childhood joy just through remembering it, much as he longs to.

• Meter

  "I Remember, I Remember" uses a variation on common meter. In a poem written in common meter, the lines alternate between iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in line 5's "He nev- | er came | a wink | too soon") and iambic trimeter (lines of three iambs, as in line 12 "Those flow- | ers made | of light!"). This was a popular form in Hood's era: Hood was one of many writers who followed in the footsteps of writers like Coleridge and Wordsworth, influential Romantic poets who advocated for a return to the simple forms and language of old ballads and folk songs.

  Here, there are a couple of small differences, though. First off, poems in common meter are usually written in quatrains (or four-line stanzas); here, the speaker doubles those quatrains up, forming octaves.

  Then there's the refrain that opens every stanza. The rhythm of these echoing words is almost (but not exactly) anapestic dimeter, a line of two anapests. An anapest is a metrical foot with a da-da-DUM rhythm; these anapests each have an extra unstressed syllable clinging to their ends, like this:

  I remember, | I remember

  Each stanza thus starts with a pulsing, muttery line, like a chant or a spell taking the speaker back into the steady swing of his memories.

• Rhyme Scheme

  "I Remember, I Remember" follows a simple rhyme scheme that runs like this:

  ABCBDEFE

  This pattern breaks each octave (or eight-line stanza) down into two four-line passages, each with the same kind of alternating rhyme pattern. This light, easy interplay of sounds feels simple and nursery-rhyme-ish, suiting the poem's nostalgic tone.

  Across the poem, of course, the first A rhyme is always the same: the echoing "remember" of the refrain forms an identical rhyme that ties the whole work together. The speaker also throws in an emphatic internal rhyme at the end of the third stanza:

  And summer pools could hardly cool
  The fever on my brow!

  This extra little dash of rhyme adds special intensity to the speaker's dark musings on his unquenchable fever—an image that might be read metaphorically as a vision of adult cares and worries, but also literally as Thomas Hood's all-too-real account of dealing with persistent illnesses (which would kill him at the age of only 45).

“I Remember, I Remember” Speaker

• The speaker is a voice for Thomas Hood himself. Hood suffered from bad health for much of his short life; he would die at the age of 45 after years of sickness. The "fever" on the speaker's brow isn't just a metaphorical fever of worry or unhappiness, then, but a very real ailment.

  However, readers don't need to know Hood's history to understand this speaker's character. This nostalgic man looks back on the happy days of his youth with deep sorrow, understanding his childhood as a lost paradise. In his fond memories, every day of boyhood was bliss: the flowers seemed to be "made of light," the sun never "brought too long a day," and to ride on a swing was to feel as free and light as "swallows on the wing."

  Adulthood feels very different. Though the speaker never explains exactly why his life feels so painfully changed now, he darkly hints that all is the opposite of what it once was: his once birdlike spirit is "heavy now," and the joys of summer can no longer soothe him. Perhaps, the poem suggests, a loss of wholehearted childhood delight is just part of growing up, whether or not one is enduring particular sufferings.

“I Remember, I Remember” Setting

• This poem seems to take place almost entirely in the speaker's memories of his childhood home. He thinks back fondly on the "house where [he] was born," a place that (to his nostalgic mind) seemed like an earthly paradise. In the speaker's memory of childhood, it always seems to be high summer: the roses, violets, and lilies are in bloom; the swallows are swooping; the cheery sun comes "peeping in" the speaker's window every morning.

  The speaker's vision of these bright, happy days of boyhood freedom is clearly rose-tinted. He doesn't recall, say, trudging to school in a rainstorm or getting stuck in bed with the mumps. His vision of his childhood is both romantic and capital-R Romantic: like Hood's contemporary William Wordsworth, this speaker treats childhood as a time when you're closer to heaven than you can ever be as an adult.

  Alas, life has changed for the speaker now. Though the speaker never reveals much about his adult circumstances, readers can gather that life feels very far from his childhood paradise these days. Adult cares and worries make his soul heavy. And even though the laburnum tree his brother planted is "living yet"—a line that suggests the speaker can still visit his childhood home if he likes—the old feeling of the place is lost forever.

Literary and Historical Context of “I Remember, I Remember”

Literary Context

Thomas Hood (1799-1845) was a British poet, journalist, and humorist. Born and raised in London, he would become one of the city’s important literary men, a champion and friend of some of the most notable writers of English Romanticism. In his role as a sub-editor of The London Magazine, he traveled in the same circles as John Keats, John Clare, Charles Lamb, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

In this poem, Hood shows his own Romantic stripes. His vision of childhood as a time when people are closer to heaven than they could ever be as adults reveals the influence of William Wordsworth (one of the granddaddies of English Romanticism), who famously wrote that children see the natural world with the “glory and the freshness of a dream”—a power of seeing that fades away as they grow up.

Other works of Hood’s are also rooted in 19th-century concerns about the lives of the working poor. His famous “Song of the Shirt” tells the story of a seamstress working her life away “in poverty, hunger, and dirt,” without “one short hour” for leisure, or even for tears of grief over her predicament. This poem—which made a splash, getting republished and discussed all over Europe—was part of a rising 19th-century tide of radical literature, in which writers like Percy Shelley, Blake, and Dickens railed against economic and political injustice (all in their different ways).

Though one wouldn’t know it from “I Remember, I Remember” or “Song of the Shirt,” Hood also loved humor and light verse. Over the course of his short life, he would edit several journals of comic writing, including Hood’s Monthly Magazine and Comic Miscellany, The Gem, and the Comic Annual.

Next to “Song of the Shirt,” “I Remember, I Remember” is perhaps Hood’s most famous poem, and recent writers like Philip Larkin and Mary Ruefle have responded to it in verse and prose.

Historical Context

This nostalgic poem draws on Thomas Hood’s own experiences. While Hood was born right in the middle of London on Poultry (a central street in the oldest part of town), his family moved to Islington when he was small. Islington is now unequivocally urban, swallowed up by the expanding city. But when Hood was writing, it was still a leafy suburb surrounded by fields. It's this early home that Hood's speaker thinks of so wistfully here.

The speaker's adult sorrows, sadly, are also Hood's own. Hood always had troubles with his health, and the speaker’s mention of the “fever on [his] brow” is an all-too-real evocation of Hood’s sufferings. He wrote this poem in 1826, when he was only 27, but he was already suffering from the beginnings of the ailments that would eventually kill him.

Hood was one of many young poets of this era whose career was cut tragically short. While he outlived Keats (who died of tuberculosis at 25), Percy Shelley (who drowned at 29), and Byron (who died of a fever at 36), he nonetheless joined an unhappy Romantic literary tradition when he died at 45.

More “I Remember, I Remember” Resources

• External Resources

  • A Contemporary's Memory of Hood — Read a reflection on Hood by his acquaintance S. C. Hall.

  • The Comic Annual — Take a look at the text of an edition of Hood's Comic Annual for a glimpse of the poet's influential role as a humorist and editor.

  • A Brief Biography — Read an overview of Hood's life and work.

  • The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.

  • Portraits of Hood — See some portraits of Hood made not long before his untimely death.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Thomas Hood

  • The Song of the Shirt