Remember by Christina Rossetti
Quick answer: Remember by Christina Rossetti analysed: the sonnet's turn from remembrance to release, its Petrarchan craft, and what modern poets can learn from it.
Christina Rossetti wrote Remember in 1849, at nineteen, and published it in her 1862 volume Goblin Market and Other Poems. It begins as the most conventional of deathbed requests, remember me when I am gone away, gone far into the silent land, and repeats that plea with mounting specificity for eight lines. Then the sestet quietly dismantles everything the octave asked for. If you forget me for a while and remember afterwards, do not grieve; better by far that you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.
It is one of the most anthologised sonnets in English, read constantly at funerals, and its lasting surprise is that a poem titled Remember talks itself, in real time, into permitting forgetting.
What the poem says
The octave imagines the separation concretely and domestically. The speaker, addressing a beloved, anticipates the silent land where she can no longer be held by the hand, nor half turn to go yet turning stay, that exquisite detail of a couple's daily leave-taking, the lingering at the door. There will be no more shared plans, no more of the future the beloved used to describe. All she asks, twice over, is remembrance, since counsel and prayer will be too late.
The volta arrives with a hesitation: 'Yet if you should forget me for a while'. Having asked for memory, the speaker imagines its lapse, and instead of reproaching, absolves. Do not grieve the forgetting. Her reasoning is the poem's emotional core: if darkness and corruption leave any vestige of the thoughts she once had, then what matters is not being remembered but the beloved's happiness. The final couplet weighs the alternatives explicitly and chooses: forget and smile rather than remember and be sad. The gift asked for in line one is returned, transformed, in line fourteen.
How it works
Remember is a strict Petrarchan sonnet: ABBAABBA octave, CDDECE sestet, iambic pentameter throughout, and Rossetti uses the form's hinge with textbook clarity, petition before the volta, renunciation after. The diction is almost entirely plain monosyllables, gone away, hold me by the hand, day by day, which gives the one ornate phrase about darkness and corruption its cold weight.
The subtlest craft is in the repetitions. Remember tolls through the poem five times, but its force decays with each appearance, from command to concession, until the final line replaces it with smile. The poem also runs on futurity: nearly every verb looks forward, you shall, I shall, you should, a dying speaker conducting the beloved's future grief like a rehearsal.
Why it lasts
The sonnet lasts because it enacts, within fourteen lines, the whole moral arc that grief counselling takes months to reach: the desire to be held in memory, and the harder, more loving release of the mourner from that duty. Mourners read it at funerals because it gives them the dead person's permission to heal. It also carries a quiet drama of self-overhearing: you can watch the speaker change her mind between line eight and line nine, and poems that visibly think, rather than announce finished thoughts, age well.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the self-countering sonnet. Spend your octave asking for something with full sincerity, then let the sestet withdraw or transform the request. The volta becomes an act of character, not just a change of topic.
Steal the decaying repetition: repeat one word through a poem while draining or reversing its force, so the final appearance means almost the opposite of the first. Judges reading for structure and emotion together, as Writory's do each month, notice when a poem's architecture is itself the emotional event.
What poets can take from this
- Let your sonnet's sestet retract what its octave begged for; the reversal is the poem.
- Repeat a single key word until its meaning wears down and turns over.
- Choose one tiny gesture of intimacy, a half-turn at the door, over any declaration of love.
- Write a dying speaker who worries about the survivor's feelings, not their own legacy.
- Keep the diction monosyllabic so one dark formal phrase can land with full weight.
Try it yourself
Write a fourteen-line poem that opens by asking someone to promise you something after you are gone, and turns, midway, into releasing them from the promise, ending on the word you least expected to end with.
Questions
What is the message of Remember by Christina Rossetti?
The poem moves from asking a beloved for remembrance after death to releasing them from that obligation. Its final message is that the beloved's happiness matters more than the speaker's memory: better to forget and smile than remember and be sad.
What type of sonnet is Remember?
It is a Petrarchan sonnet in iambic pentameter, with an ABBAABBA octave and a volta at line nine. The octave makes the plea for remembrance; the sestet qualifies and finally reverses it.
When did Christina Rossetti write Remember?
She wrote it in 1849, when she was nineteen, and published it in Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862. Despite her youth, it has become one of the standard poems of mourning in English.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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