Grade 9 Notes: Remember
Remember is fourteen lines long, so learn it the way it is built: octave first (the asking), sestet second (the taking back), volta between them. Everything in this poem is architecture — if you can explain why line 9 begins with “Yet”, you can explain the whole sonnet. Revise the rhyme scheme until you can hear the enclosing ABBA arms of the octave and the loosened sestet; learn the two euphemisms (“gone away”, “the silent land”) against the one un-euphemised image (“darkness and corruption”); and prepare your comparison pairings in advance, because Section B is a comparative essay and the partner poem is half your marks. The poem is printed in the exam paper — your job is not memorisation but knowing, before you walk in, exactly which words you will close-read.
Character studies
The speaker
A dying voice that asks to be remembered — then gives even that away
The speaker of Remember is facing death, and knows it. She does not rage, bargain or console herself with heaven; she manages the one thing still within reach — how the person she loves will feel afterwards. For eight lines she asks for remembrance, and the asking shrinks as it goes: first the loss of presence, then of touch, then of the planned future, until all that is left is “Only remember me”. Then the sestet performs the most surprising act in the anthology: she takes the request back. If remembering means grief, she would rather be forgotten — “Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad.” Whether that reversal is read as the purest generosity in the anthology or as a Victorian woman trained to erase herself, the voice remains in complete command of its own surrender: calm, precise, and speaking in grammar that is already half posthumous.
The beloved — the silent ‘you’
The listener whose smile wins the argument
The beloved never speaks, never acts in the poem's present, and is never described — no face, no name, no history. Yet the sonnet is built entirely around him: “you” and “your” sound through the poem far more often than “me”, and every one of its fourteen lines exists to manage his future feelings. We know him only through habits the speaker treasures — he held her hand, he talked “day by day” about the future he “plann'd” — and through the conscience she anticipates: she knows he will forget “for a while”, remember “afterwards”, and feel guilty. The poem's final judgement is passed in his favour: his smile is ruled worth more than her memorial. Whether he is the most loved figure in the anthology or the quiet beneficiary of a woman's self-erasure depends on which reading of the speaker you argue — he is the still point around which that whole debate turns.
Thesis statements
- Remember is not a request to be remembered but a demonstration of how to be forgotten well: the octave's shrinking petitions exist so that the sestet can surrender the last of them, and the sonnet's true imperative is not “Remember me” but “do not grieve”.
- Rossetti chooses the Petrarchan form because her subject is a mind changing: the octave's enclosing ABBA rhymes hold on as the speaker asks to be held, and the sestet's wholly new rhyme sounds perform the release the argument then reasons its way to.
- The poem's gentleness is a strategy proved by its one suspension — “darkness and corruption” — which shows the speaker can name the grave exactly, and converts every euphemism around it from evasion into protection of the listener.
- The speaker's surrender can be read as the anthology's purest generosity or as Victorian femininity's deepest training — and the poem's immaculate formal control is evidence for both: authority freely exercised, or discipline so internalised it governs even her renunciation.
- Remember is a will written in verse: a poem of time-clauses in which a speaker with no future distributes feelings instead of property — bequeathing the beloved his own happiness and paying for it with her memorial.
- The title and the final line disagree — “Remember” against “sad”, the command against the outcome of obeying it — and the fourteen lines between them are the argument by which a poem named for memory reasons its way to recommending forgetting.
Essay plans
- Compare how the poets present facing death in Remember and Do not go gentle into that good night. — Both poets reach for strict inherited forms to hold death steady, but the forms think differently: Rossetti's Petrarchan sonnet is built around a volta and so can reverse its own request, while Thomas's villanelle is built on return and so can only insist — acceptance and rage are engineered into the architecture before a single image is chosen.
- Compare how the poets present love in Remember and Sonnet 116. — Shakespeare and Rossetti both stage love's confrontation with time as a sonnet-length argument, but where Sonnet 116 defines love by its refusal to alter — “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” — Remember defines it by one deliberate alteration, the surrender of memory itself; constancy and release become rival proofs of the same devotion.
- Compare how the poets present memory in Remember and Piano. — Lawrence and Rossetti agree that memory is the survivor's burden but stand on opposite sides of the grave: Piano shows remembering-and-being-sad from inside — a grown man ambushed by “the flood of remembrance” — while Remember legislates against that very flood in advance, a dying woman ruling that her beloved should “forget and smile” rather than suffer what Lawrence's speaker suffers.