Love, Desire & Renunciation
Rossetti's love poetry is defined by what cannot be: impossible love, lost love, renounced love, love separated by death. The intensity with which she depicts renounced desire reveals profound ambivalence — poems that enact the very passion they ostensibly reject.
Overview
Unlike traditional love poetry celebrating union and fulfilment, Rossetti's verse maps the territory of longing, loss, and withdrawal. Yet the intensity with which she depicts renounced desire suggests profound ambivalence — these are poems that enact the very passion they ostensibly reject. Speakers who claim to want forgetting remain obsessed with memory; those who renounce earthly love do so with such sensuous language that the poetry itself becomes a form of possession.
Rossetti's love poems reveal the psychological complexity of Victorian femininity — women taught to suppress desire, yet desire remains, finding expression through negation, absence, and the very act of saying "I will not speak of this."
Central Paradox
Speakers who claim to want forgetting remain obsessed with memory; those who renounce earthly love do so with such sensuous language that the poetry itself becomes a form of possession.
Key Patterns
- Death as rival or resolution: Earthly love vs. divine love
- Memory vs. forgetting: Should the beloved be remembered or released?
- Speech vs. silence: Whether to articulate love or maintain restraint
- Presence through absence: Lost beloved more powerful than present one
- Time's tyranny: Love cannot survive temporal change, decay, death
Poems covered: "Remember," "Echo," "Song (When I am dead, my dearest)," "Twice," "Memory," "‘Have you forgotten?’," "Sweet Death," "A Triad"
"Remember" (p. 16)
Petrarchan sonnet · ABBAABBA CDDECE
Text and Form
A Petrarchan sonnet that begins as conventional memorial poem but subverts expectations. The octave instructs the beloved to remember; the sestet reverses, urging him to forget if remembering causes pain. The volta (turn at line 9) is dramatic — from command to permission, from speaker's need to beloved's welfare.
Detailed Analysis
Lines 1–4
Remember me when I am gone away, / Gone far away into the silent land; / When you can no more hold me by the hand, / Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
The opening imperative establishes the speaker's central anxiety: posthumous oblivion. Yet euphemisms soften death's reality \u2014 'gone away' (like travel), 'silent land' (pastoral, not terrifying). The repetition of 'gone' and 'away' emphasises distance, not horror.
Line 3's physical intimacy — "hold me by the hand" — is Rossetti's most directly sensual expression in the poem. The hand-holding suggests courtship, marriage, companionship. Its loss represents not just death but the end of physical connection.
Line 4's paradox — "half turn to go yet turning stay" — captures the leave-taking moment's ambivalence. The speaker cannot fully commit to departure; she's torn between staying (life, love, presence) and going (death, duty, absence).
Lines 5–8
Remember me when no more day by day / You tell me of our future that you planned: / Only remember me; you understand / It will be late to counsel then or pray.
'Day by day' suggests the dailiness of love \u2014 routine, ordinary, precious. 'Future that you planned' is poignant: it's his future, not ours, because she's already excluded herself through anticipated death.
"Only remember me" intensifies the imperative. The adverb "only" suggests: this is all I ask; this small thing; nothing else matters. Yet "only" also limits — just remember, don't do more.
"It will be late to counsel then or pray" — once she's dead, he cannot seek her advice or her prayers. The relationship's interactivity ends. "Late" suggests both too late (time has passed) and chronologically late (evening of life). Prayer's futility after death is theologically complex.
Lines 9–11 (The Volta)
Yet if you should forget me for a while / And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
The volta: dramatic shift from command ('remember') to permission ('forget'). 'Yet' signals reversal. 'For a while' softens forgetting \u2014 temporary, not permanent abandonment.
"And afterwards remember" suggests memory's inevitable return. Even if he forgets, he'll remember eventually. Forgetting may be self-protective, temporary, healthy; later, he can remember without pain. Or: forgetting is impossible; memory resurfaces despite attempts to suppress it.
Lines 12–14
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.
'Darkness and corruption' name death's physical reality \u2014 the body's decay, opposed to earlier euphemisms. The poem moves from euphemism to brutal honesty.
"A vestige of the thoughts that once I had" — after death, will any consciousness remain? Victorian crisis: do we persist after death as ourselves, or are we transformed beyond recognition?
The final couplet offers an impossible choice: forget and smile, or remember and be sad. She claims to prefer his happiness (forgetting) to his fidelity (remembering). But the poem's very existence contradicts this — she writes to ensure he won't forget. The poem enacts what it claims to reject.
Context (AO3)
Victorian Memorial Poetry
Genre dominated by sentimentality, religious consolation, certainty of heavenly reunion. Rossetti's poem is more psychologically complex — speaker doubts the afterlife, prioritises beloved's happiness over her own memorial.
Gender Dynamics
Female speaker makes no demands on male beloved — she gives him permission to forget, move on, presumably remarry. This aligns with Victorian ideal of female self-sacrifice. Yet the poem's artistry ensures he won't forget — the poem itself is memorial, more lasting than memory.
Biographical Context
Written 1849 (age 19), before her two refused marriage proposals. Not about a specific relationship but anticipates the renunciation theme that dominates her work. Rossetti chose spinsterhood (religious and possibly health reasons), yet writes powerfully about romantic love's loss.
Form & Language (AO2)
Sonnet Tradition
Petrarchan form traditionally encodes courtly love — male poet worships unattainable female beloved. Rossetti inverts: female speaker addresses male beloved, but she's unattainable through death, not disdain. The volta complicates rather than resolves.
Repetition
"Remember" appears 6 times; "forget" 3 times. "Gone" appears 3 times in the first 4 lines. Repetition creates an incantatory, obsessive effect — the speaker cannot let go.
Euphemism vs. Honesty
"Silent land" vs. "darkness and corruption" — the poem moves from comforting metaphor to physical reality. This structural movement mirrors the psychological journey from denial to acceptance.
Conditional Language & Negation
"If," "should," "would" — uncertainty pervades. "No more," "nor," "do not" — a poetry of what's lost, absent, forbidden. Negation defines the poem's emotional landscape.
Critical Perspectives (AO5)
Feminist Readings
Dolores Rosenblum argues the poem reveals "the paradox of women’s power through powerlessness." The speaker claims no power (she's dead, cannot demand remembrance), yet the poem ensures her permanence.
Sharon Smulders reads it as critique of female self-abnegation — the speaker's selflessness is also self-erasure, and the poem questions this.
Religious Readings
Some critics see Christian resignation — speaker accepts death, trusts God's plan, prioritises charity (beloved's happiness) over self-interest. Others note the poem's theological uncertainty — doubt about afterlife, consciousness, reunion.
Psychoanalytic Readings
Represents ambivalence about being forgotten and desire to be remembered. The contradiction between "remember" and "forget" suggests psychological splitting — conscious self wants beloved's happiness; unconscious self demands eternal fidelity.
Connections (AO4)
Key Quotations
- Remember me when I am gone away — Opening imperative; anxiety about being forgotten; euphemism for death
- When you can no more hold me by the hand — Physical intimacy lost; touch as connection
- Only remember me; you understand — Intensified plea; assumed intimacy; 'only' limits and emphasises
- Yet if you should forget me for a while — Volta; reversal; permission to forget
- Darkness and corruption — Death's physical reality; brutal honesty replaces euphemism
- Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad — Apparent selflessness; impossible choice; contradiction with poem's existence
"Echo" (p. 30)
Two octaves · ABABCDCD
Text and Form
The title names the poem's central conceit — the beloved's voice echoes in the speaker's mind, inescapable, tormenting. Echo (Greek myth: nymph cursed to repeat others' words) suggests the speaker's lack of autonomous voice, her identity consumed by the beloved.
Detailed Analysis
Lines 1–4
Come to me in the silence of the night; / Come in the speaking silence of a dream; / Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright / As sunlight on a stream;
Anaphora ('Come...Come...Come') creates an incantatory, spell-like quality \u2014 the speaker summons the absent beloved as if through magic. The imperative mood shows desire's urgency.
"Speaking silence" is oxymoron — silence that communicates, pregnant with meaning. Dreams speak what waking consciousness suppresses. The physical description — "soft rounded cheeks," "eyes as bright / As sunlight on a stream" — is sensuous, tender. This is Rossetti's rare moment of unguarded sensual appreciation.
Lines 5–8
Come back in tears, / O memory, hope, love of finished years. / O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, / Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
'Memory, hope, love of finished years' \u2014 three nouns mapping a temporal relationship. Memory = past; hope = future; love = ongoing present feeling despite absence. 'Finished years' yet love persists.
"Too sweet, too bitter sweet" — repetition and paradox. "Sweet" repeated thrice shows the dream's pleasure. But "too sweet" suggests excess, danger — sweetness that harms. "Bitter sweet" is oxymoron: pleasure is also pain because it's illusory. "Whose wakening should have been in Paradise" suggests the dream anticipates heavenly reunion. But waking in earthly life is harsh return to separation.
Lines 9–12
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give / Pulse for pulse, breath for breath: / Speak low, lean low,
The speaker desires reciprocal physical intimacy. Pulse and breath are bodily rhythms, signs of life. This is Rossetti's most physically intimate love language \u2014 not genital but cardiovascular, respiratory, embodied.
"Speak low, lean low" — imperatives invite physical and vocal closeness. "Low" (quiet, intimate, close to ear) suggests secrecy, privacy, whispered confidences.
Lines 13–16
As long ago, my love, how long ago.
Repetition emphasises temporal distance. 'Long ago' creates fairy tale quality. The caesura after 'my love' isolates the vocative, making it tender, painful.
The final four lines repeat lines 1–4 exactly — circular structure suggests obsession, inability to move beyond this moment. The speaker is trapped in repetitive loop, like Echo condemned to repeat. Memory doesn't progress; it circles.
Context (AO3)
Echo Myth (Ovid)
Nymph Echo falls in love with Narcissus, who rejects her. Cursed by Hera, she can only repeat others' last words. She fades until only voice remains. Rossetti invokes this — the speaker's identity is consumed by the beloved.
Victorian Mourning Culture
Elaborate rituals governed grief — women wore black, mourning jewellery made from the deceased's hair, widows waited years before remarrying. Dreams of the dead were common topic in spiritualist culture (1850s–70s). Rossetti participates in this but also critiques endless mourning as self-destructive.
Form & Language (AO2)
Repetition & Circularity
Opening and closing stanzas mirror each other. Within stanzas, anaphora ("Come...Come...Come"), repetition ("sweet...sweet...bitter sweet"). Repetition enacts obsession, memory's inescapability, Echo's curse.
Oxymoron
"Speaking silence," "bitter sweet" — paradoxes capture love's contradictions. The beloved is absent but present, memory is pleasure and pain, silence communicates.
Sensory Language
Visual ("bright," "sunlight"), tactile ("soft," "rounded"), auditory ("speak low"), physiological ("pulse," "breath"). The poem is intensely embodied despite the beloved's absence.
Circular Structure
Ending where it began suggests no resolution, no progress, no escape. The speaker is trapped in eternal return.
Critical Perspectives (AO5)
Psychoanalytic
Freudian melancholia — speaker cannot complete mourning, cannot detach from lost object (beloved). The melancholic incorporates the lost object into the ego, making loss part of identity. The speaker's identity becomes the loss itself.
Feminist
Poem dramatises women's limited options in Victorian culture — without husband, woman's identity is absence, echo. Yet the poem's artistry transcends this — Rossetti gives voice to voicelessness, makes absence present through language.
Connections (AO4)
Key Quotations
- Come to me in the silence of the night — Incantatory opening; night as time of vulnerability, dreams
- Speaking silence — Oxymoron; silence pregnant with meaning; dreams communicate
- Memory, hope, love of finished years — Temporal triad; past, future, present; 'finished' yet ongoing
- Too sweet, too bitter sweet — Paradox; pleasure is pain; excess; oxymoron captures love's contradiction
- Pulse for pulse, breath for breath — Physical intimacy; bodily rhythms; erotic unity
- As long ago, my love, how long ago — Temporal distance; fairy tale past; tender vocative; repetition
"Memory"
Two-part lyric · Part I (1857) ABAB · Part II (1865) ABBA
Text and Form
Memory is a two-part lyric poem, the two halves written eight years apart: Part I in 1857, Part II in 1865. This compositional gap is itself significant — the poem is not a unified utterance but a diptych, its two halves reflecting different emotional and spiritual positions separated by nearly a decade of living.
Part I consists of five quatrains in alternating rhyme (ABAB), all end-stopped, with a shorter final line in each stanza that creates a sense of truncation, of something cut off. Part II consists of four quatrains using a palindromic ABBA structure with indented B-lines, and with more fluid enjambment — the form itself enacts the greater ease and acceptance of the later writing.
Together, the nine stanzas chart a journey from the acute, private violence of self-denial to a quieter, more settled coexistence with what has been lost — and a turn toward spiritual hope.
Detailed Analysis
Part I, Stanzas 1–2: Nursing and hiding
I nursed it in my bosom while it lived, / I hid it in my heart when it was dead.
The verb 'nursed' gives the love the quality of an infant or a wound — something dependent, requiring care, held close to the body's warmth. The shift from 'nursed' to 'hid' marks the transition from life to death.
While the love lived, it was tended openly (if privately); once dead, it is concealed. "Hid" carries a note of shame or secrecy — the dead love cannot be shown, cannot be mourned publicly. This doubleness — loving the love while alive, hiding it once dead — establishes the poem's central paradox: the act of suppression is also an act of preservation. To hide something in the heart is to keep it.
"In joy I sat alone, even so I grieved / Alone and nothing said" — the parallelism of "in joy... alone" and "grieved / Alone" conflates opposite emotional states through a shared condition: solitude. Whether joyful or grief-stricken, the speaker is alone, and neither emotion can be shared. "Nothing said" — the silence is not merely circumstantial but chosen, deliberate, the first sign of the willed self-containment that governs the whole poem.
Part I, Stanzas 3–4: The scales and the choice
I shut the door to face the naked truth, / I stood alone — I faced the truth alone, / Stripped bare of self-regard or forms or ruth / Till first and last were shown.
The speaker's confrontation with truth is private, enclosed, performed behind a shut door. 'Naked truth' and 'stripped bare' suggest a kind of spiritual or psychological undressing — all social performance ('forms'), all self-protection ('self-regard'), all pity ('ruth') removed.
The dashes around "I stood alone" give it an isolated emphasis, the typography enacting solitude within the line itself. The image of the "perfect balances" — "I took the perfect balances and weighed; / No shaking of my hand disturbed the poise" — is the poem's most judicial moment. The speaker becomes her own judge, weighing the love with absolute steadiness. The "perfect balances" recall the scales of justice and of the Last Judgement.
The end-stopped finality of "silent made my choice" is the most compressed moment in the poem: a life-altering decision rendered in five words, behind a closed door, without speech.
None know the choice I made; I make it still. / None know the choice I made and broke my heart, / Breaking mine idol: I have braced my will / Once, chosen for once my part.
The repetition of 'None know the choice I made' across consecutive lines is the poem's most haunting moment. The choice is simultaneously still being made (present tense: 'I make it still') and already complete — it was made once, definitively, yet requires perpetual recommitment.
"Breaking mine idol" — the love was an idol, a form of false worship; its destruction is both violent ("broke my heart") and theologically necessary, a clearing away of what stood between the speaker and God. "Braced my will" — the will as a body part, stiffened against collapse.
Part I, Stanza 5: The slow death
I broke it at a blow, I laid it cold, / Crushed in my deep heart where it used to live. / My heart dies inch by inch; the time grows old, / Grows old in which I grieve.
The violence of 'broke it at a blow' and 'crushed' contrasts with the slowness of 'inch by inch' and the repeated 'grows old.' The love was destroyed suddenly ('at a blow') but the dying is gradual, protracted, measured in the smallest increments.
The repetition of "grows old" — used twice in successive lines — gives the stanza a tired, aged quality; the grief is not acute but chronic, a permanent condition that ages alongside the speaker rather than healing. This is the poem's lowest point: the cost of the choice made behind the shut door, paid daily, silently, alone.
Part II, Stanza 6: The inner room
I have a room whereinto no one enters / Save I myself alone: / There sits a blessed memory on a throne, / There my life centres.
The transition to Part II eight years later is immediately audible in the changed register. Where Part I was governed by destruction, concealment and dying, Part II opens into a space — private but structured, a room rather than a hiding place.
The memory is no longer concealed but enthroned — elevated, honoured, made sacred. "Blessed memory" — the adjective "blessed" shifts the register from grief to devotion; the memory has become something venerated, even worshipped, but now appropriately so (unlike the "idol" of Part I, which had to be broken). "There my life centres" — the memory is not peripheral or suppressed but the organising principle of the speaker's existence.
Part II, Stanzas 7–8: Seasons and the buried
While winter comes and goes — oh tedious comer! — / And while its nip-wind blows; / While bloom the bloodless lily and warm rose / Of lavish summer.
The seasonal imagery marks time passing across the inner room's threshold, the 'tedious' repetition of winters and summers expressing not despair but a kind of patient endurance. The 'bloodless lily' is a striking image — traditionally associated with purity and death, but 'bloodless' drains even its usual vitality.
If any should force entrance he might see there / One buried yet not dead
The conditional intruder would discover something disturbing: the love is 'buried yet not dead.' This is the poem's central paradox stated most directly. The burial of Part I — 'crushed in my deep heart' — did not achieve death; it achieved a kind of living entombment.
The memory persists, undead, in the inner room. "Before whose face I no more bow my head / Or bend my knee there" — the speaker no longer prostrates herself before the memory as before an idol; the relationship has changed from worship to something more equal, more clear-eyed.
Part II, Stanza 9: Paradise
But often in my worn life's autumn weather / I watch there with clear eyes, / And think how it will be in Paradise / When we're together.
The closing quatrain moves from the private inner room outward to eternity. 'Worn life's autumn weather' — the speaker is ageing, the metaphorical autumn of her life coinciding with the seasonal imagery of the previous stanza.
"Clear eyes" — she watches the memory with clarity now, not the anguish or the judicial coldness of Part I. The turn to Paradise — "When we’re together" — is the poem's most hopeful moment, and grammatically it is a certainty: not "if" but "when." The separation of earthly life is temporary; reunion is assured by faith. The love denied in life will be fulfilled in eternity.
Context (AO3)
Biographical and Compositional Context
Part I was written in 1857, the year Rossetti rejected Charles Cayley's proposal on grounds of religious incompatibility — her second refused proposal (James Collinson having been rejected in 1850). The speaker's judicial weighing and deliberate choice directly reflects Rossetti's own biographical pattern: choosing faith over romantic love, with full awareness of the cost.
Part II was written in 1865, by which point Rossetti had developed a close friendship with Cayley (though she ultimately rejected his later formal proposal in 1866). The shift in Part II toward a more settled, even hopeful register corresponds to a period of emotional consolidation rather than acute loss.
Victorian Renunciation Poetry
Memory participates in the Victorian tradition of renunciation poetry — poems in which the speaker voluntarily gives up an earthly good for a higher spiritual end. This tradition is widespread in women's poetry of the period (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Adelaide Procter), but Rossetti's version is distinguished by its psychological realism: the cost of renunciation is not minimised but dwelt upon at length, the "inch by inch" dying of the heart given full weight before the spiritual consolation of Part II arrives.
Reception: Feminist and Religious Readings
Victorian readers would likely have read Memory as an exemplary poem of female self-denial — the speaker's quiet, uncomplaining sacrifice aligned with the period's idealisation of female self-abnegation. Later feminist critics, however, have read the poem's very artistic elaboration as a subversive act: by writing with such precision and power about the cost of self-denial, Rossetti simultaneously enacts and questions it. The poem's existence as art — beautiful, enduring, widely read — is itself a form of self-assertion that contradicts the speaker's silence and suppression.
Form & Language (AO2)
Two-part structure / compositional gap
The eight-year gap between Part I and Part II is formally meaningful — the poem is not a single utterance but a record of development; the reader experiences time passing between the two sections.
ABAB (Part I) → ABBA (Part II)
The shift from alternating to enclosed rhyme enacts the movement from acute anguish to contained, protected memory — the ABBA structure surrounds its inner lines, just as the inner room surrounds the memory.
End-stopping vs. enjambment
Part I's end-stopped lines enact the sealed, shut quality of the speaker's self-containment; Part II's more fluid movement suggests greater ease, openness, acceptance.
Shorter final line in each stanza
The truncated fourth line creates a repeated effect of curtailment, something cut short — formally enacting the love's termination.
Repetition of "alone"
Used four times in the first two stanzas, enacting isolation not merely as circumstance but as the poem's governing atmosphere.
"Inch by inch"
Slowness of grief as physical measurement; dying rendered in the smallest possible increments.
"Buried yet not dead"
The poem's central oxymoron; the love is simultaneously destroyed and preserved — suppressed but not erased.
"Blessed memory on a throne"
The transformation of the idol into something legitimately venerated; Part II's reframing of Part I's destruction.
"When we’re together"
The grammatical certainty of the conjunction "when" (not "if") at the poem's close; faith expressed through syntax.
Critical Perspectives (AO5)
Aesthetics of Renunciation
Dolores Rosenblum reads the poem as a key example of Rossetti's "aesthetics of renunciation" — the paradox by which the act of giving up produces the most powerful art. The speaker denies herself love but creates a poem of extraordinary emotional precision about that denial; the artistic achievement is inseparable from the sacrifice that generates it.
Biographical / Agency
Jan Marsh contextualises Memory within Rossetti's biographical pattern of refused proposals, arguing that the poem should be read not as passive resignation but as an act of agency — Rossetti chose her faith, and the poem documents that choice with unflinching psychological honesty.
Feminist Ambivalence
Feminist critics have noted the poem's ambivalence: on the surface it enacts female self-erasure (silent, alone, telling no one); yet the poem's very existence as durable, widely-read art contradicts the silence it describes. The speaker says "none know the choice I made" — but the poem ensures that everyone who reads it does.
Religious Reading
Religious critics read the poem's two-part structure as a spiritual journey from caritas (love of the world) to agape (love of God and hope of reunion), the "blessed memory on a throne" representing love properly ordered under faith rather than idolatrously placed above it.
Connections (AO4)
Key Quotations
- I nursed it in my bosom while it lived, / I hid it in my heart when it was dead — Opening paradox: nursing then concealing; preservation through suppression
- I stood alone — I faced the truth alone — Repeated isolation; dash emphasises solitude; confrontation as private ritual
- No shaking of my hand disturbed the poise — Judicial self-control; perfect steadiness in the act of judgement
- None know the choice I made; I make it still — Choice as perpetually renewed, not completed; present tense destabilises finality
- My heart dies inch by inch; the time grows old — Grief as chronic, incremental, ageing — not healing but persisting
- One buried yet not dead — Central oxymoron; love simultaneously destroyed and preserved
- I watch there with clear eyes — Part II's shift to clarity and equanimity — judicial coldness replaced by acceptance
- how it will be in Paradise / When we're together — Grammatical certainty of faith; earthly renunciation reframed as temporary separation
Key Patterns Across Theme
The Remember/Forget Paradox
All three poems negotiate between memory and forgetting. "Remember" moves from insisting on memory to permitting forgetting. "Echo" shows forgetting is impossible. "Song" claims genuine indifference. Together they map Rossetti's complex, contradictory relationship with memory — it's both precious and painful, desired and feared.
Female Agency Through Renunciation
In each poem the female speaker renounces: in "Remember," she renounces her own memorial; in "Echo," she renounces waking reality for dreams; in "Song," she renounces all mourning conventions. Paradoxically, renunciation becomes a form of control — by giving up claims, the speaker asserts autonomy.
Death as Threshold
Death is never simply ending but a boundary state. The "silent land," the dream-space, the "twilight that doth not rise nor set" — all are liminal, in-between spaces. Rossetti's speakers don't die into oblivion or heaven, but into ambiguity.
The Poem as Contradiction
Each poem's existence contradicts its content. "Remember" says "forget" but ensures remembrance. "Echo" enacts the very obsession it describes. "Song" claims indifference but is too artful to be truly uncaring. The poems perform what they deny.
More poems in this theme: "Twice," "‘Have you forgotten?’," "Sweet Death," and "A Triad" — additional detailed analysis to follow.