Remember by Christina Rossetti

Christina Rosetti was born in London in 1830. She was one of four children, her parents were Italian. Her father, Gabriele Rosetti was a poet. One of her brothers, Dante Gabriele Rosetti was a poet and a painter. She is best represented in poetry by her ballads and mythical religious lyrics. (www.poets.com) In the 1880s, She contracted Grave's disease, a thyroid disorder and in 1891, Rosetti developed cancer, from which she died in London on December 29th, 1894. (www.poets.com) The poem, as the title of it says, deals with remembrance. In this case the writer is addressing someone, a husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend. I feel that this work falls squarely into the category of lyric poetry. Lyric expresses the emotions of the poet as well as their thoughts and feelings. The poet is asking their significant other to remember them when they go away, which I interpret as dying. Through the first eight lines of the poem the writer is firm on the wish that their lover remember them, seemingly wishing for them to not move forward, but to keep up a vigil of remembrance of the other. In lines nine through fourteen the writer has a change of heart, saying if the lover has bad thoughts of their past, as well as feels guilty for forgetting the writer for an extended period of time saying " Line 13:Better by far you should forget and smile, Line 14:Than that you should remember and be sad.",In the end the writer chose to see past their self interest in being remembered and realized that the happiness and well being of their partner was more important, if they are truly loved they can never be forgotten. The only example of a figure of speech I found was a metaphor used in line thirteen, "Better by far you should forget and smile", by far being the metaphor. The poet, Christina Rosetti, is Italian, and her poem falls squarely under the Italian version of a sonnet. The Petrarchan ( or Italian ) sonnet characteristically consists of an eight-line octave, rhyming