23 pages • 46-minute read
Remember
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Symbols & Motifs
The Hand
Although far from a scandalous poem, “Remember,” in introducing the implied intimacy of two lovers holding hands, introduces a level of physical intimacy—a level of intimacy, by the way, the speaker lists as the first thing she will miss. “When you can no more hold me by the hand […] Remember me” (Lines 3, 5). Holding hands would be pretty hot stuff for Victorian England. For a straightlaced Victorian culture that viewed any open discussions about sex as scandalous, the poem uses the symbols of holding hands to suggest the potent physical connection between the two lovers. Holding hands suggests the defiant catapult across boundaries of conventional propriety, the intensity of the emotional connection that cannot be held back. In a poem centered on separation and the act of moving away from others, holding hands suggests the fragile power of connection, a defiance of what the speaker acknowledges awaits her too soon, the separation of death itself.
It should be noted that the speaker acknowledging that in death their hands will be forever parted from his, noting that “he” can no longer hold her “by the hand,” has been taken to suggest a triumphant feminism, a freeing of the speaker. That reading is bolstered two lines later when the speaker acknowledges that she is ready to follow his lead, acknowledging that he tells the speaker about their future, which suggests she is compelled to play a subservient role to her husband. That reading imports much into the otherwise sweet, even simple image of two lovers holding hands, less a suggestion of tyrannical domination and more a suggestion of how the two have managed to bridge their isolation, the hands suggesting not so much the depth of the woman’s enslavement as the reach of their love.
The Silent Land
The speaker, in preparing to die, prepares to depart, not for Heaven, not even for Hell, but rather for a place she calls “the silent land” (Line 2), a euphemism for the afterlife that reveals, quietly, the dimensions of the speaker’s alarm.
Not that Judeo-Christians should hunger after death, but they should anticipate the rewards of the afterlife. The poet should invoke heaven. Rossetti was a committed Anglican who studied scripture most of her adult life. Although she undoubtedly understood the term “heaven,” the speaker moves into the “silent land” (Line 2). Within Christian theology, which, again, Rossetti rigorously followed and carefully studied most of her adult life, heaven is the consolation for mortality, a way to move up, the traditional direction of paradise, to a realm of angels, perpetual bliss worshipping at last at the feet of God the Creator. Heaven is the glorious compensation for enduring the hard process of living, dying. Although no reliable descriptions of heaven exist, the Christian mythology of heaven suggests splendid effects: sweet music, gorgeous swales of light, hovering angelic figures, and, given the nearness at last of the Triune God, a happy sense of union.
For Rossetti, however, the anticipation of heaven can do little to ease the depth of her sorrows over leaving her lover. To set as her destination the magisterial sweep of heaven would help diminish the sorrow she feels over her approaching departure. Her euphemism—the silent land—is telling. As a voracious reader, a lover of music, a practicing poet, at least by reputation something of a bon vivant in conversations within the artistic community of London, she conjures the one image that would most encapsulate the idea of hell for her. Nothing less than silence, the abandonment of words themselves. The silent land, her euphemism for hell, indicates the depth of her anxiety. She is a poet, after all, and to lose language itself would be the direst of punishments. In this way, the speaker underscores the magnitude of the death she is facing.
Corruption
It is a cliché of psychology (and theology) that the intellect is too limited to comprehend the implications of putrefaction, the body’s ultimate and inevitable physical decay. Decomposition is central to the rise of religion—awareness of death creates the intense need to transcend physical death and the brutal business of rotting by projecting a cosmic happy place where bodies, whisked off by a loving Creator God, are illuminated into iridescence by the stunning sparkle of grace.
However the Christian afterlife is conceived, license is given to ignore or reconsider the reality of what happens to the body after the massive irreversible organ failure known as death (God, being omnipotent, would surely make short work of any rotting through divine healing anyway). No one wants to think about the reality of decomposition. It is one thing to understand death is inevitable and always getting closer but something quite different to accept the implications of it. In admitting in Line 11 that she will be subject to corruption, a euphemism for rotting, the poet acknowledges rather than retreats from the grim business of decay. As she speaks to her lover, she offers no images of her looking down on him from heavenly glory. Rather she acknowledges to him the enclosing darkness of the grave and her own physical decay, offering only the hope that perhaps rising from the feculent remains of her body, a fragile memory of her, a “vestige” (Line 12) of a thought of her, might somehow remain with the lover. Do not imagine me, she says, as some angel in white robes drifting happily in the clouds. I am in the ground. I am alone. I am in absolute darkness. And the pleasant and comely physical form he so loves—the touch of her hand, the lilt of her voice, the soft linger in her eyes—is collapsing into a most unpleasant and disturbing organic debris.
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