Remember - Christina Rossetti Revision Guide

Student Revision Guide
This Revision Guide offers 7 clear sections: Overview; Form and Structure; Close Analysis; Key Themes; Context; Critical Perspectives; Study Questions and Extension Activities.
The Close Analysis section works through the octave’s repeated plea to be remembered when the speaker is gone far away into the silent land, and the volta at ‘Yet’, where the sestet releases the beloved: better by far to forget and smile than to remember and be sad. Form and Structure examines the Petrarchan sonnet and the five uses of ‘Remember’ that drive the argument before the sestet lets go. Context covers Rossetti’s faith, Victorian attitudes to death and mourning, and the poem’s publication in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Critical Perspectives weighs how far the sestet’s release is selfless, and what it reveals of the speaker’s view of death.

Quotation Quilt
A selection of key quotations from ‘Remember’, arranged to support the themes and concepts an essay on this poem is most likely to need.
Quotations are grouped by the silent land; hold me by the hand, and half turn to go yet turning stay; the future you planned; the repeated command to remember; the volta and forgetting for a while; darkness and corruption; and better by far you should forget and smile.