Appreciation of Poetry
Senior 6 · Literature in English
Appreciation of Poetry
Lesson 5 of 5
25 min
Christina Rossetti was eighteen when she wrote "Remember" in 1849. It was published in 1862 in her first major collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, and it is often read at funerals. It is fourteen lines long, and it changes its mind halfway through.
Remember
Christina Rossetti (written 1849, published 1862)Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| counsel | give advice, make plans together |
| corruption | here, the decay of the body after death |
| vestige | a small trace of something that has almost disappeared |
This lesson adds the last three stylistic devices in your toolkit, then shows you how to bring every tool from this unit together in a full appreciation, using "Remember" as the model.
Definition
An oxymoron is a paradox compressed into a phrase. In John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), hell has "No light, but rather darkness visible": a darkness you can somehow see, which is more frightening than plain blackness. In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (Act 1, Scene 1), the love-sick Romeo pours out a string of them, "O brawling love! O loving hate! … Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!", and the clashing words show a mind at war with itself. Tennyson describes the knight Lancelot, torn between loyalty to his king and love for the queen: "His honour rooted in dishonour stood, / And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true."
Rossetti's line "Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay" works the same way through action: the lover turns to leave and stays in the same movement, which captures the unwillingness of two people to part.
Both devices let a poet name a big idea through something concrete. In "Death the Leveller" (1659), James Shirley writes that at death
Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
The sceptre and crown stand for kings, the scythe and spade for farm labourers: these are metonymies, because the objects are associated with the people, not parts of them. Four objects carry the whole argument that death makes the powerful and the poor equal. William Wordsworth, in "London, 1802", complains that "altar, sword, and pen" have lost England's old strength: church, army and literature, named by their tools.
Synecdoche uses a part for the whole. Hardy's soldier in Lesson 4 would treat his enemy "where any bar is": the bar, one part of a pub, stands for the pub itself. Shelley asks the wind to speak "through my lips to unawakened earth": the lips stand for the poet's whole voice, and "earth" (a metonymy) for the people of the world.
| Metonymy | Synecdoche | |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship | association: a thing linked to the idea | part and whole: a piece of the thing |
| Everyday | "The pen is mightier than the sword"; "Parliament voted" | "All hands on deck"; "fifty winters" (years); "a roof over your head" |
| In poetry | "Sceptre and crown"; "altar, sword, and pen" | "where any bar is"; "through my lips" |
| Effect | makes an abstract idea (power, faith) concrete | focuses attention on the part that matters (the hands that work, the lips that speak) |
An appreciation answers three questions: what does the poem say, how does it say it, and how well? Build it in this order, but always connect each paragraph to meaning.
| Paragraph | What to cover | In "Remember" |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Introduction | Title, poet, date, form; the poem's subject in one sentence; your thesis | A Petrarchan sonnet in which a dying speaker first asks to be remembered, then frees her beloved to forget |
| 2. Content and structure | Speaker, situation, development, turn, ending | Octave: "Remember me" three times; volta at "Yet"; sestet: forgetting is better than grief |
| 3. Language and devices | Imagery, sound, stylistic devices, each with quotation and effect | Euphemism "gone away", "the silent land"; "half turn to go yet turning stay"; "darkness and corruption" for the grave |
| 4. Tone, mood and theme | How the tone shifts; the themes | From pleading to selfless; love that puts the other's happiness first |
| 5. Evaluation | How well it works; your response, with reasons | The plain words and the turn make the love feel real, not sentimental |
Worked example
A model appreciation of "Remember" (paragraphs 2 to 5)
Content and structure. The speaker, facing death, addresses the person she loves. The octave is a plea: "Remember me" opens line 1 and line 5, and "Only remember me" returns in line 7, so the command is heard three times as she lists what death will end, the holding of hands and the shared "future that you planned". At line 9 the poem turns on one word, "Yet". If her beloved forgets "for a while", she now says, "do not grieve", and the sestet ends by reversing the opening: "Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad."
Language. Rossetti never names death. She uses gentle euphemisms, "gone away", "the silent land", which soften the fact as one would for a grieving person. Only in the sestet does the harsher phrase "the darkness and corruption" appear, a metonymy for the grave and the body's decay, but it comes inside a clause about love surviving: if even "a vestige" of her thoughts remains, they will wish him happiness. The line "Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay", with its near-contradiction, captures the reluctance of lovers to part, and the repeated "turn" makes the reader hesitate too.
Tone and theme. The tone moves from urgent, even possessive, pleading to calm generosity. The theme is that true love wants the other person's happiness more than its own memory.
Evaluation. The poem's power lies in its restraint. The language is plain, mostly short everyday words, and the strict Petrarchan form gives the emotion a shape. The volta is the poem's moral act: the speaker gives up what she most wanted. The more often we read it, the less it seems a poem about death and the more it seems a poem about love.
The last sentence of the model uses a double comparative: two clauses, each beginning with the + a comparative, to show that one change goes with another.
| Pattern | Example |
|---|---|
| The + comparative adjective/adverb + clause, the + comparative + clause | The closer you read, the richer the poem becomes. |
| The more/less + noun + clause, the … | The more poems you learn by heart, the better your recitation. |
| The more/less + clause, the … | The more she pleads, the less we expect her to change her mind. |
| Short fixed forms | The sooner, the better. The more, the merrier. |
| Repeated comparative (gradual change) | The light grew fainter and fainter. Our debates became more and more heated. |
Rules: put a comma between the two halves; never stack two comparatives ("the more better" is wrong: write "the better"); and keep the noun with "more" ("The more poems you read", not "The more you read poems" when poems is the point).
Tip
Plan for five minutes before you write an appreciation. Annotate the poem with three colours: one for content and structure, one for sound and imagery, one for stylistic devices. Then choose your three strongest points. Five well-explained points beat fifteen device labels.
Warning
"Remember" by Christina Rossetti, read for LiveCanon, a poetry performance company and publisher. Listen for the pause at "Yet" in line 9, where the poem turns.
Practice
Further reading
Sources and credits
