Remember

Christina Rossetti · Written 1849 · Published 1862 · One of the sixteen compulsory anthology poems on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Literature (4ET1)

A sonnet that asks to be remembered — and then, at the volta, reverses its own request.

Two ways to study it

• Grade 9 Notes — condensed and exam-focused: 2 full character studies, 5 themes, quotation analysis, thesis statements and essay plans.
• The Complete Guide to Remember — the long version: 11 chapters from the world behind the text to the examination.

The characters covered

• The speaker — A dying voice that asks to be remembered — then gives even that away
• The beloved — the silent ‘you’ — The listener whose smile wins the argument

The themes covered

• Remembering and forgetting — The poem stages a debate between its title and its ending: memory begins as the speaker's last claim on the world and ends as a burden she refuses to impose. Remembering and forgetting swap moral places across the volta.
• Love and selflessness — The poem defines love by what it is willing to give up: the speaker surrenders the only afterlife she is offered — existence in the beloved's memory — the moment it conflicts with his happiness.
• Death and the silent land — Death is a country, not an event: a silent land the speaker is departing for, described almost entirely through euphemism — except once, when the poem looks straight at the grave.
• Time and the planned future — The poem is a machine built of time-clauses: a speaker with no future spends fourteen lines legislating for everyone else's, while the future she was promised — “plann'd” daily by the beloved — dissolves.
• Speech, silence and the unsaid — A talking poem about the end of talk: telling, counselling, praying and understanding fill the octave, and all of them stop at the border of the silent land.