Remember Christina Rossetti Rhyme Scheme

Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, in pensive mood, eyes downcast, half-profile

● Christina Rossetti was born in London in December 1830, one of 4 children of Italian parents.

● At the historic period of xviii she became engaged to James Collinson, 1 of the Pre-Raphaelite circle of artists, of which her blood brother Dante was a founding member, just this was abandoned in 1850 when James converted to Catholicism (she and her sister, Maria were devout Christians, but committed to High Anglicanism.)

● After a short spell endeavouring to set up a day school, she withdrew somewhat into a individual world, suffering from bouts of recurring and often debilitating illness.

● Later in life, she became emotionally involved with another gentleman, Charles Cayley, but in this instance his clashing attitude to Christianity was sufficient for her to refuse any proposal of marriage.

● With the publication of a major anthology of poems in 1862 (including Goblin Marketplace), her reputation grew and she was widely recognised for her work during her lifetime.

● She continued to be intimately connected with the Pre-Raphaelite circle of painters, models and poets for much of her life, and amid a broad social circumvolve enjoyed friendships with many of the luminaries of the age, including William Morris, Bong-Scott, Swinburne, Lewis Carroll, Elizabeth Siddal, James Whistler and many others until her death in 1894.

Insights, themes and ideas for interpretation

● Although published in 1862, the verse form, which is in sonnet grade, was written much earlier when Rossetti was yet in her teenage years - probably effectually the fourth dimension of her engagement to James.

● The poet contemplates her own mortality and considers the event her decease will accept on those closest to her. Perhaps she is thinking, too, of ane special person, someone she loves.

● She asks that she be remembered, but non that the remembering exist overdone. The lengthy process of mourning was a Victorian obsession that she would have known only as well well. But a year before publication, the husband of Queen Victoria died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 42, ushering in decades of public mourning.

● Those who are bereaved, the poet suggests, should do well non to grieve excessively, at least not in the long term. Nor does she wish those who remember her to be sad. She would rather they forget her entirely – meliorate to forget and smiling than to think and be distressing.

● The middle lines of the sonnet are also revealing, stating that after her passing it is already as well tardily to counsel or to pray - mayhap (if the verse form was indeed conceived at the fourth dimension of her engagement), a reference to her fiancé's Catholicism. With a little irony she tells us that information technology will all be too late past then.

● Finally, the poet wonders if there might exist some vestige of consciousness that might remain across the corruption of the grave, and if so, urges her reader to reflect on her wishes. It is both a high Gothic sentiment, and a noble one.

Technical info'

Type of Poem =

a Petrachan, or Italian sonnet of 14 lines containing two distinct sections: the starting time eight lines being chosen the 'octave' and the remaining 6, the 'sestet.' In such pieces, the boundary between these two sections, called the Volta, oftentimes accompanies a turn or alter of direction in the meaning of the piece as a whole.

Rhyme Scheme =

ABBA ABBA for the octave, then CDD ECE for the sestet.

Meter =

iambic pentameter (v pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables per line)