Remember

The poem at a glance

Rossetti wrote the sonnet in 1849, at just nineteen, imagining her own death and addressing the man she would leave behind. The octave piles up the pleas: remember me when you can no longer hold my hand, when there is no future left to plan, when it is ‘late to counsel then or pray’. Then ‘Yet’ changes everything. If forgetting for a while spares him grief, he should not grieve; if a trace, a ‘vestige’, of her thoughts survives in him, that is enough. The final couplet is the sacrifice: she gives up her own remembrance, her legacy, for his happiness. Beth’s reading in class: this is what love as sacrifice looks like.

Methods that matter

Form: a Petrarchan sonnet that changes its mind

The sonnet form does the emotional work. The octave is governed by the repeated imperative ‘Remember me’, a rising insistence; the volta arrives exactly on schedule at line nine with ‘Yet if you should forget me for a while’, and the sestet unsays the octave. A poem that argues with itself needs a form with two halves, and Rossetti uses the machinery of the love sonnet, usually a vehicle for possession, to perform an act of release.

Euphemism: death at one remove

Death is never named. It is ‘gone away’, ‘the silent land’, ‘darkness and corruption’ only at its darkest. The euphemisms soften the subject for the beloved, and for the speaker herself, turning dying into a journey to a far country. ‘The silent land’ is worth dwelling on: what is missing there is not light or life but communication, which is why remembering, the last one-way conversation, matters so much to her at first.

Repetition and its undoing

‘Remember’ tolls through the poem like a bell, and ‘no more’ counts off everything death removes: the held hand, the half-turn to go yet turning to stay, the shared plans. But the sestet quietly replaces ‘remember’ with ‘forget’, and commands become concessions. Students debate whether the octave is an order or a plea; either way, the poem’s structure moves from the speaker’s need to the beloved’s wellbeing, and that movement is its meaning.

Key quotations

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘Remember me when I am gone away’ (l. 1)	Imperative, euphemism	Order or plea? The opening sets the debate, with death already softened into a departure.
‘Gone far away into the silent land’ (l. 2)	Metaphor	Death as a country without speech: what she dreads losing is connection, not life itself.
‘When you can no more hold me by the hand’	Physical imagery, repetition of ‘no more’	Grief made concrete and bodily: love counted out in small, ordinary touches about to be lost.
‘Yet if you should forget me for a while’ (l. 9)	Volta	The sonnet’s hinge: ‘Yet’ turns insistence into permission, and the argument reverses.
‘Better by far you should forget and smile’ (l. 13)	Comparative, antithesis	The sacrifice completed: his happiness outweighs her remembrance, love proved by letting go.