High Grade Analysis of Remember by Christina Rossetti

In this video, we cover:

• The Three Interconnected Themes: How death, love, and memory are inextricably linked, showing that the desire for remembrance and the willingness to be forgotten both stem from deep affection.

• The Petrarchan Sonnet Structure: How the traditional 14-line form is split into an octave (the problem) and a sestet (the solution), with the turn between them marked by a volta.

• The Octave as a Problem: Analysing the repeated imperative "Remember me" not as a demand, but as a pleading request born out of fear of the finality of death.

• Subverting the Rhyme Scheme: Why Rossetti follows the rigid ABBAABBA rhyme scheme in the octave, but breaks traditional convention in the sestet (CDDECE) to mirror the physical act of forgetting and moving on.

• Euphemisms and Metaphors for Death: Decoding the journey metaphor ("gone away, / Gone far away into the silent land") and anadiplosis, highlighting the absolute permanence and distance of death.

• Agency in Life vs. Helplessness in Death: The physical contrast between holding hands or turning to leave yet choosing to stay, versus the complete loss of control when passing into the grave.

• Planning the Future (Context): The 19th-century gender dynamics of "our future that you planned", reflecting shared domestic hopes that are severed by mortality.

• The Volta & The Selflessness of Love: The shift at line nine ("Yet if you should forget me for a while / And afterwards remember, do not grieve"), moving from a focus on the self to comforting the survivor.

• "Darkness and Corruption": Acknowledging the physical reality of decay and the grave, contrasting with the tender, selfless resolution of the final couplet: "Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad."

Timestamps

• 0:00 – Key Themes: Death, Love, Memory, & Selflessness

• 2:21 – Structure of the Petrarchan Sonnet: Octave (Problem) vs. Sestet (Solution)

• 4:52 – The Rhyme Scheme: Why Rossetti Deliberately Breaks Tradition in the Sestet (CDDECE)

• 10:24 – Stanza 1 / Lines 1–4: Pleading Imperatives, Euphemisms, & The "Silent Land"

• 16:10 – Lines 5–8: Holding Hands, Agency in Life, & "Our Future That You Planned"

• 23:11 – "Only Remember Me": The Conflict of the Octave

• 26:16 – The Volta: Shifting from Pleading to Comforting ("Do Not Grieve")

• 27:23 – "Darkness and Corruption": Physical Decay & Total Selflessness

• 29:22 – The Final Resolution: "Better by Far You Should Forget and Smile"

All of these videos are on my YouTube channel. However, there are a few benefits to watching them here instead:

1. You can register to keep a track of which videos you’ve watched

2. You can bookmark lessons for later

3. There may or may not be no ads, but I can neither confirm nor deny and I definitely didn't tell you if YouTube asked, OK?

There are also study materials on the site that can help with this IGCSE:

• Fiction Technique Bank: An extensive revision toolkit outlining key linguistic and structural devices, complete with explanations and model examples to show you how to analyse writer's craft rather than just spotting techniques.

• Unlocking Shakespeare: A complete student guide packed with practical reading strategies, contextual breakdowns, and methods to decode Early Modern English without getting stuck in the language.

• Still I Rise Teaching PowerPoint: A fully resourced, line-by-line slide deck exploring form, structure, poetic devices, and historical context for focused study or revision.

• Poetry Technique Bank: A dedicated guide designed specifically to master poetic form, metre, rhyme schemes, and structural choices across both seen anthology and unseen poetry questions.

Lesson Transcript

0:00 – Key Themes: Death, Love, and Memory Intertwined

This is one of those poems that I loved even before I started teaching, and it's incredible that Christina Rossetti wrote this at 18, because it has such a deep understanding of the complexity of human emotion around death and how we want to be remembered. And in that sense, its three main themes are death, love, and memory.

Death, because this is a poem about how someone wants to be remembered when they die. Memory, because this is a poem about how someone wants to be remembered when they die. And love, because the way they want to be remembered when they die is keenly tied in with love. They want to be remembered because that would have—that would say something about the fact that they were loved and therefore remembered, but also at the same time, the reason they're willing to be forgotten is because they love, and they don't want their loved ones to be sad and grieve after they have died.

On death, we're going to see Rossetti acknowledging the sort of finality and inevitability of death, and the impact that death has on those left behind. On love, we're going to see the selflessness of love: the way that someone can be like, "It's okay to forget me if that makes you sad; I would rather you were happy and forgot about me," but also there is still a desire to be remembered by your loved ones. And then this is also tied up with memory, because we see on the one hand how we as human beings value remembrance and see that as being really important, but at the same time how it can be okay to move on as well. So the three themes are very intermingled; essentially, if you're talking about one of them, you're talking about the others as well. It's not really possible to separate death, love, and memory in this poem. So with all of that in mind, let's get stuck into the actual language and structure of the poem.

2:02 – Form & Structure: The Petrarchan Sonnet & The Octave/Sestet Dynamic

Usually I always like to talk about language before structure, because I think language is where the meat of meaning is and then structure reinforces that. However, I think that for this particular poem, the structure helps us with understanding the sort of tone that's sort of lying underneath the words, so I want to talk about that first. And what I want to talk about is the fact that this is a Petrarchan sonnet.

Now my first test is: can I get the spelling of Petrarchan correct, because I never remember the second R! Um, a Petrarchan sonnet: don't worry too much about why is it called that, essentially there was a guy called Petrarch. What is significant about the structure that he uses though: it's always 14 lines, and it essentially has two parts to it—an octave and a sestet. Octave being the first eight lines, and a sestet being the final six lines.

And in Petrarchan sonnets, the aim of the octave—so this is not just about the poem "Remember," this is any Petrarchan sonnet you ever come across—the octave is always about setting out a problem, while the sestet is about the solution. So when Rossetti is talking about the fact that she wants to be remembered when she's when she dies, we shouldn't really view that as her making like a command, even though it's going to be a lot of imperatives of "remember me, remember me." But actually, because it's in an octave, which is about setting out a problem, think of it more as her like an underlying acknowledgment of the conflict of what she's saying. Like, she is making a request of of "remember me," but the structure means she's also sort of acknowledging that that's not a straightforward thing that she's requesting: there is a challenge, there is an issue to what she's requesting. When we get into the language, we can think a bit more about: what is that problem, what is that challenge that she is suggesting there is to wanting to be remembered by your loved ones?

4:04 – The Volta: Shifting from Problem (Remember Me) to Solution (Forget Me)

And then when we are going to reach our sestet where she's offering the solution, the shift between those two is called a volta. So this sort of change here is called a volta. Now in the case of "Remember," the volta is that she's going to shift from "remember me, remember me, remember me" to: "I'd rather you forgot about me and were happy." So, and again we'll get more into into this as we go through the language, in that sense, if the solution is "forget me to be happy," then the implied problem to "remember me" is her understanding of how painful that can be for our loved ones.

4:52 – Subverting the Rhyme Scheme: Why Rossetti Uses CDDECE in the Sestet

Now usually in a Petrarchan sonnet, the rhyme scheme—and don't write this down because she's about to break it, so you can write down the way she breaks it, but don't write down this rhyme scheme I'm about write down—usually the rhyme scheme goes ABBA ABBA for the octave, and then for the sestet CDE CDE or CDC CDC or CDE DCE, which I appreciate all those different letters can just make your head spin a little bit, which is why I don't need you to remember that or write that down. I just need to know she doesn't follow that.

She follows it for the octave: she rhymes the first eight lines ABBA ABBA. So you've got "away" and "stay" rhyming, and you've got "land" and "hand" rhyming; then you have "day" and "pray" rhyming, and you have "planned" and "understand" rhyming. When it comes to the sestet though, she follows a slightly different rhyme scheme: she goes "while" and "smile," "grieve" and "leave," and "had" and "sad." So she goes CDD ECE.

Why on Earth would she do that? Why would she choose to break the rhyme scheme? And I can hear them in the back, I can hear the chorus of: "cuz she felt like it!" But think about it this way: if you've gone through all the effort of following a traditional poetic structure, if you've gone through the hard work and effort of keeping it to 14 lines, of making it have an octave and a sestet, of making it have a volta, of making the octave rhyme ABBA ABBA, only someone who is chaotic would suddenly be like, "You know what, just for the sake of it and for no other reason than that, I'm not going to follow the rhyme scheme of the last six lines." So there's got to be a reason; she would not just on that final step choose to not follow it for no reason.

To explain my reason, I've got to jump back to the original rhyme scheme for a second, and think about: why would a poet choose to use one of those two rhyme schemes? So if we take CDE CDE, there's a repetition: three lines following the exact same pattern, and a poet might use that in order to create a sense of repetitive order. You've then got CDC DCD: now it's not a direct repetition, but there is an interweaving because D appears in both and C appears in both, so it creates a sort of, you know, intertwining effect between them.

However, with Rossetti's sestet, CDD ECE, there is a separation. D does not appear again, E wasn't in there earlier, and C is the little bit that repeats, and it's so far apart! Like the lines "while" and "smile," as you're reading the poem, are so far apart, it's to be honest easy to completely miss it, and you don't even really experience it as a rhyme because they're so far apart from each other. And that, I think, is completely on purpose, and fits with the point that she's trying to make about death and memory, right? Because this rhyme scheme, the way that she's changed this rhyme scheme, is a physical representation, a physical symbol of the act of forgetting something, of losing something and moving on to something different. Because she moved on from a CDD rhyme scheme to an ECE, and the C is still, you know, it's there, but it's not the core, it's not the rhyme; the DD is the rhyme you notice in "grieve" and "leave," the EE is the rhyme you notice, and the C is like a minor thread. So we could say that this entire uh change she does in the sestet is symbolic to the point that she's trying to make of: it's okay to forget, it's okay to move on. Because neither of those rhyme schemes in the original Petrarchan sonnet would really support that feeling; they are both about something continuing, about something being interwoven um, and they don't really work for that. So she changed it, and she made it work for the message of her poem.

9:27 – Sonnets as Love Poetry: Subtle Structural Meaning

A final thing I just want to note about the structure of this poem is that Petrarchan sonnets typically are used for love poetry. Obviously this is a poem that appears on its surface to just be about death, but of course by making it a love poem—using, sorry, a structure that's commonly used for love poems—she is managing to subtly communicate through the structure that this is as much a poem about love as it is death.

The structure of this poem is incredibly important in reinforcing the ideas that the language are going to communicate as well, and I think it's really clever the way she's built that into the very subtle fabrics of the poem: into the rhyme scheme, into the structure um, into just even the choice of form that she's gone for, cuz that is what the sonnet is, it's the form of poetry that she's gone for. So let's get into the language of this poem now.

10:24 – Stanza 1: "Gone Away," Anadiplosis, & The Metaphor of the Long Journey

Obviously it's called "Remember," and we see this imperative of "remember me" being repeated multiple times throughout the poem. But what's important to remember about "remember" is that it's not being—the the tone behind it, right, because it's not being said in a "you will remember me" kind of way. It's, if anything, if we think about what we've already said about the structure of it and the themes of love and their desire to be remembered and the fact that she's setting out a problem, it's almost, I would go, like a sort of pleading.

And I think that comes across when we see how she then goes on to describe death itself, because she says: "when I am gone away, / Gone far away into the silent land." So that choice of language of "gone away" is euphemistic; I mean, so is "silent land," it's all euphemistic in how it talks about uh death. In particular, she uses more of an idea of a journey, because it's like she's traveled somewhere, she's traveled to this silent land. And she also repeats the phrase: "I am gone," "gone away," "gone far away." So we have this anadiplosis as well. That anadiplosis is when you uh repeat a word or phrase at the end—you had it first at the end of one line, and then you repeat it at the start of the next line, so that's what she does here.

Now I've just laid out a whole bunch of different terminology there, so what is the significance of all that of all of that terminology? Well, in choosing to go for a journey, and then re-stressing "gone away, gone far away"—cuz of course she doesn't repeat word for word, she adds the word "far"—she's really emphasizing the distance. She's using journey because, if you think about it as not just a euphemism but as a metaphor, we can better understand. As human beings, we only experience death once and we can't tell anybody about it, but we can all experience a long journey. And so we can better comprehend that concept of someone being gone really far away from us, and all the feelings that can come from that when your loved one travels really far away from you: the longing for them, the missing them, the wishing they could be with you. And of course all of those feelings that can exist when someone we love goes on a long journey can also be true when someone we love dies as well; often art is true.

13:05 – The Ambiguity of "The Silent Land": Peace vs. Eerie Loss of Voice

What's interesting about the—it is both a euphemism and metaphor to say "the silent land." It is a metaphor, but she's also using a metaphor in order to be euphemistic, so she doesn't have to say "when I am dead."

What's interesting about that image of the silent land is the different ways you could interpret it. The silence could have connotations of peace, calm, because of the quietness; but it can also be eerie, mysterious, something sort of like unknowable, and feel frightening in that sense that it's the—what is silent? It is you: you are silent in that land. So that feeling of never being heard of again, never speaking again, and so on.

So it's a euphemism; it's referring to the fact that, you know, sounds obvious to say out loud, but when we die, we can no longer talk to the people that we love. So it could be seen as reinforcing that image of the loss; it could be seen as reminding us that, you know, their their connection with each other will be lost for good in that sense. I think I I'm all for those of you who want to make a case for the calm, peaceful image, go for it in the comments! I personally am leaning towards more of a like: here's why death is scary image. And death is scary because of losing you and never being able to to talk to you again.

14:42 – The Inevitability of "When" & The Pleading Tone of "Remember Me"

And in particular, what's scary about it is that word "when": "When I am gone away." Because "when" has a guarantee to it. "When" reminds us of the inevitability: she is going to die. It's not if I go away; it's when I go away. So in that sense, the the fearful image of death is that combination of not getting to be with the people you love anymore, there is a distance that you are never going to be able to to close again, and also the fact that that's going to happen.

So that is why I say the imperative of "remember me" has the pleading tone, because it's like: if this scary thing has to happen—and this is our problem of the octave—this scary thing has to happen to me, I have to die and I'm scared, so what comforts me in that thought is that you're going to remember me, my loved ones will remember me. I think there's such a beautifully sad feeling behind this opening, because it's someone who is simultaneously accepting the inevitability of death even though it's scary, and at the same time attempting to have a kind of control over it by getting their loved ones to remember them.

16:16 – Holding Hands & Turning to Stay: Physical Agency When Alive

And we see that as it goes through the next lines as well: "When you can no more hold me by the hand, / Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay." Holding someone by the hand—again, I'm going to be making a fairly obvious statement here—holding someone by the hand symbolizes the uh intimate connection between them.

For the record, I do think this poem is speaking to—which reminds me of another technique um, apostrophe: this poem is speaking to someone in particular, that's what apostrophe means, not the punctuation mark, even though that is also an apostrophe um—and I think the speaker of this poem is specifically speaking to a romantic love. And I'll come back in a second to why I think it's a romantic love, because we're going to see that in the next lines anyway.

"Hold me by the hand" symbolizes that intimate connection, and then you have this: "nor I half turn to go yet turning stay." Now students sometimes struggle to get their head around the grammar of that, because she's using a kind of archaic um language because she is Victorian; however, it's super straightforward. Let's imagine we've got two lovers, okay, boyfriend and girlfriend, and they have to say goodbye because, you know, they've got to go their own separate ways for whatever reasons. They're holding hands, they're saying goodbye, and then let's say the girl turns away to go, and then she turns back and is like, "Oh wait, one more kiss!" So it's that like: I half-turn to go, I prepare to leave you, and then I change my mind and I turn back and I stay with you. And what this symbolizes is the fact that when we are alive, we can control our lives, and we can control how much we get to be with the people that we love; we can, instead of leaving, choose to stay. And so that therefore contrasts: "gone far away into the silent land," where we have to go, and when we go, we don't get to come back.

The first two lines about death contrast what her experience of her romantic relationship when she's alive: that she has control over things. And she's saying essentially: when I am dead, you're not going to be able to do that anymore, we aren't going to be able to do that anymore; you aren't going to be able to have that physical connection with me, and I'm not going to get to choose to stay with you, I have no control over it.

18:42 – "Our Future That You Planned": 19th-Century Gender Context & Routines

The poem then says: "Remember me when no more day by day / You tell me of our future that you planned." So this is why I think the person speaking is speaking to someone they love in a romantic fashion, because typically if you're planning a future with someone—I mean, maybe some people are just really close to their parents and plan their future with their parents, but by and large, I think if you're planning your future with someone, it's a romantic relationship, and it's, you know, it's the old: shall we get married, shall we have kids, that kind of planning.

When the speaker says uh the "day by day," I think what that phrase symbolizes is like routine in their lives. "Day by day"—it's creating this feeling, you know, we have a pattern together in our relationship, and therefore when you die, you lose that: you lose those little routines, those little habits that you have together. And in the case of this relationship, one of the things they have is that they talk about their future.

Now modern readers might pick up on the fact that it's: "You tell me of our future that you planned," and they might get a little bit, you know, indignant of: "Excuse me, why are you planning our future on your own?" So I'm just going to take a quick side step to explain why I think the grammar is that way. This is Christina Rossetti writing in the 19th century. If her speaker is female speaking to a male partner—because again, we're dealing with 19th century, it's overwhelmingly most likely heteronormative—it's also most likely operating in a gender dynamic whereby her husband is going to be the one that plans the future. Her partner is going to be the one who decides when he becomes her husband; he will be the one proposing; he is most likely the one who will decide where they will live, what they will do, how many kids they will have, etc., etc., etc. And we can get into a whole modern debate on the acceptability of that, but that's not relevant here. I don't think Rossetti is even conscious she's using that kind of language, because that is just such the status quo of the time that she's living in: of course it is natural to say your husband's planning your future. So that's why I think the grammar is "you planned."

That being said, I still think the fact that she uses the plural in "our future" shows that there is a unity between them, there is a connection between them. And the future obviously symbolizes hopes, dreams, goals that when you die are no more. And I think sometimes young people interpret that as suggesting that our speaker is is going to die young um, because there is a future that they've planned that's going to go unfulfilled, like perhaps marriage or having children. But I kind of take that interpretation with a pinch of salt, of like young people assuming that once you're past 30, you don't have a future to plan anymore so you might as well just roll over and die um, and that's not the case! You know, even 70-year-olds, 80-year-olds can plan their future with their partner and think about, even if it's as small as: are we going to go to Tesco tomorrow? There is a planning, there is a future people do for their lives at every age. So I don't take this to imply that the speaker of this poem is dying young; I just take it to imply that the speaker of the poem sees their entire life with this loved one, and therefore one of the things that they are sad about about death is losing that routine of what they have together, the day by day, and also losing that excitement of what could be, because when you die, there is no could be anymore, you're gone.

And talking about having a future that you've planned, it's also interesting if we think about the link between that and the turning to go yet stay: it's another example of the ways in which we humans have control over our lives. When we are alive, we can plan our future, we can choose to stay with the person that we love, but we do not have that control when we die.

23:11 – "Only Remember Me": The Selfish Problem of the Octave

Now this next phrase: "Only remember me." The adverb of "only" is really powerful, because it intensifies this person's pleading tone of like: they so badly want to be remembered by loved ones, that is all they want them to do. And that again is, if we think about the octave is setting out a problem, implicit behind that structure is the speaker understanding that what they're asking for here is unrealistic, is asking a lot of their loved one uh to "only remember me."

So we can think of this octave as like the desperate pleading of what you want to happen from an almost a kind of sense of selfishness of: I have no control over this, it's inevitable, and I'm going to lose you and that terrifies me and I don't want that to happen, but at the very least just just remember me, and then maybe the act of remembering me can make it, you know, feel like I'm not gone or something. Whereas then what they're going to acknowledge in the sestet is more of a reality of: actually, the I love you, and what matters is not so much that you remember me, but that you are happy. So the problem here is that sort of almost selfish instinct of the human being to just want to be remembered, and then the sestet solution is actually the selflessness of love. So the octave is the sort of selfish desire; the solution is to be selfless.

24:56 – Counsel and Pray: The Inability of the Living to Stop Death

And she says uh she says next: "You tell me of our future that you plann'd: / Only remember me; you understand / It will be late to counsel then or pray." In other words, it's a repetition of what we've seen with that lack of control. The "counsel and pray" is like the partner trying to do something about it; they're trying to—they symbolize trying to take action. So the word "to counsel" means to advise somebody on what to do, and then "to pray" obviously is about communicating with a higher power, most likely in this case the Christian God, because we're dealing with Rossetti and we're dealing with the 19th century.

"To counsel" and then "to pray"—what those two verbs symbolize is the loved one that's been left behind trying to take action by either they themselves doing something, counseling, or by trying to get someone else to do something, praying to God, most likely with the request, you know: please bring back my loved one, or please don't let them die, or something, right? Cuz actually, in fact, the fact that she's saying it's too late, the point is you can only do those things really before someone has died; she's saying essentially there's nothing you're going to be able to do. So the verbs symbolize trying to take action to control things, and the fact that it's too late represents that human beings cannot stop death: we cannot do anything about it.

26:16 – The Volta (Line 9): "Do Not Grieve" & The Comforting Tone

We then have our volta, so things are now going to flip 180, right? I've already said we've just had our octave of setting out the problem of her selfish desire of just wanting to be remembered because she's so afraid of losing the person that she loves so permanently, and then now the solution she's going to go through that: actually, I love you, and therefore you being happy is more important.

And that is exactly what she says. She says: "Yet if you should forget me for a while / And afterwards remember, do not grieve." So she's still using imperatives, but the key difference about this imperative: while "remember me" had that pleading tone to it, "do not grieve" has more more of a comforting tone to it. They are trying to be there for their loved one now, and, you know, tell them it's okay. So it's a very significant shift in tone between our octave and our sestet: from being about the self to being focused on the loved one and trying to comfort them.

27:23 – "Darkness and Corruption": Physical Decay, Fear, & Ultimate Selflessness

And she says: "For if the darkness and corruption leave / A vestige of the thoughts that once I had." So let me just translate that for a second: so "the darkness and corruption" is another euphemism for death. And what's significant about this euphemism for death is it still has within it as an unpleasant and fearful an image as the silent land; if anything, in fact, more so. "Darkness and corruption" is a more explicitly scary, fearful image, because of darkness and its classic symbolic meanings of the unknowable, but also perhaps with the and black and being like nefarious and scary, the scariness of the dark. And then "corruption" is referring to the corruption of like the physical body, the decay of the physical body, the destruction of the self. Actually, when you think about it, it's a way worse, way scarier than the silent land!

So the fact that she's using an even more frightening metaphor for death at this point, when she is also telling her partner "do not grieve, and I want you to forget me, it's okay," that's interesting because it shows how selfless she is being. She still has the fear; the fear is of death, the the fear of any if anything is is stronger and more powerful, and yet still the more important thing is the partner and them being okay um.

And her point about death is: if it leaves a vestige of the thoughts, the ones I had. So "vestige" is like the uh traces, the tiny little remains of something that is disappearing. So she's saying: if death leaves a tiny, tiny little trace of who I once was, the thoughts that once I had—and so "thoughts" symbolizes who she was—essentially acknowledging that if I am nearly entirely forgotten, it's: "Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad."

29:22 – The Final Antithesis: Better to Forget and Smile Than Remember and Be Sad

We've obviously got the antithesis going on here with "forget" versus "remember," and "smile" versus "sad." And an interesting flipping, because you usually associate remembering something with making you happy, forgetting something with making you sad; but she flips it in order to raise the point that it's better to forget and be happy.

So this sestet is pretty darn clear in its messaging of um how our speaker's changed their view, and changed it to realize that being remembered is not the most important thing, and it's the impact the death has on the loved one that's more important, and making sure that they are okay in the future.