Sonnet 71 Christina Rossetti

Everyone wants to be remembered after they die. Whether it is the lives they touched, the work they did in life, or the accomplishments they gained, every single person on Earth wants to leave a mark on the living. However, upon death, we also leave behind people we care about, shell-shocked and depressed at the death of a loved one. The struggle of wanting to be remembered and wanting to minimize the negative impact of their death is something both Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 71” and Christina Rossetti’s “Remember” balance. Both poems involve the author addressing the impending grief their lover will experience after they die. The poems take differing stances on the world around them, and the reasons the author should be forgotten., both authors

She concludes that her lover should remember her after she dies. Shakespeare establishes his setting as negative and hurtful, and then uses that as reasoning to be forgotten after he dies. Rossetti sees the world in a more positive light, and stresses her desire to be remembered. “Remember” handles death more elegantly than “Sonnet 71”. She opens the poem with a plea to her lover to “Remember me when I am gone away” (1). Alluding to death as ‘going away’ minimizes the negative emotional impact that the loss will have on her lover, as she asks to be remembered even when she is dead. “Remember” handles death more elegantly than “Sonnet 71”. While Shakespeare uses imagery of corpses in the ground, Rossetti refers to the afterlife as “the silent land” (2). The connotation of ‘silent’ invokes a milder tone, as Rossetti uses a more innocent way to describe where she will be after she dies. Compared to the gritty, down-to-earth (literally) imagery that Shakespeare utilizes when talking about death in his poem, Rossetti presents a kinder, softer world to her lover. This happier world is one where she wants her significant other to remember her, a statement Rossetti stresses through repetition throughout the poem. While Shakespeare blames the terrible world around him as the reason to forget him, Rossetti’s world is one in which her lover can remember her, even after she is dead, without fear of

In the first four lines of the poem, he adamantly expresses his dislike of the world around him, and instructs his lover to forget him. However, the later stanzas in the poem reveal his need to be remembered as well. He shifts between the two ideas through the diction in the fifth verse, “Nay, if you read this line, remember not/The hand that writ it” (5-6). ‘Nay’ is utilized as a transition between the two topics, and by placing it, Shakespeare reveals he has doubts about his previously-strong argument proposed in the first four lines. By doing this, Shakespeare shows he has a sense of humanity, drawing sympathy from the readers by being unafraid to say he has doubts about death. The humanization of the author is fully realized through his later decision in the poem to ask his lover to only remember the work he did, not the man who wrote it. Asking his lover to “…remember not/the hand that writ it; for I love you so”, his impact on Earth will be something that doesn’t directly relate to the relationships he held (6). Shakespeare’s diction, with ‘writ’ in the past tense and ‘love’ in the present, emphasizes that while he will love the recipient of this poem forever, his time on Earth is in the past, and is temporary. This verse displays the depth of Shakespeare’s dedication to his lover,