Remember
14 lines · about a minute to read aloud
Christina Rossetti · 1862
Free to use in the UK and the US
Remember
Christina Rossetti · 1862
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. 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. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: 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.
Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems, Christina Georgina Rossetti. Project Gutenberg eBook #16950, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16950/pg16950.txt, printed under the heading 'Remember' with the subtitle 'Sonnet'. Gutenberg does not name which printing it transcribed, which does not bear on the clearance: Rossetti died in 1894 and no modern editor stands between this text and her.
Public domain in the UK and the US · serany.app
What Serany thinks about this poem
Background
Rossetti wrote it in 1849, when she was nineteen, and published it in 1862 in Goblin Market and Other Poems. It is a sonnet, which is why it is fourteen lines and why the argument turns where it does: the form puts the change of mind in a fixed place.
Meaning
The first eight lines ask to be remembered. The last six take it back. She says that if remembering her is going to make you sad, she would rather you forgot her and were happy. That turn is the poem: it hands the person left behind permission to stop grieving, from the one person who could give it.
Who's it for
This is the one to read when the person arranging the funeral is the one who needs looking after. It speaks in the voice of the person who died and releases the people listening, which is a hard thing for a family member to say in their own words and an easy thing to borrow. It suits a long marriage or a close parent, and a mourner everyone is quietly worried about. It does not fit a death nobody has accepted yet, because its comfort depends on being ready to hear it.
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