![]() Repetition: The persona repeats the phrase "And if thou wilt," in the last two lines of the first stanza.Evidence for this can be found immediately in the first line of the poem: "When I am dead, my dearest,". This allows the reader to develop an emotional connection with the persona. The sonnet uses a direct address which means that the first person persona (or the voice of the poem) is talking to an addressee.This form of hymn meter with alternating longer and shorter lines gives the poem a song-like rhythm which gives the poem a confident tone. This again is different to the even-numbered lines of the stanzas which are all in iambic trimeter. These metrical lines are composed of two iambs and an amphibrach. Here an iambic tetrameter is used, therefore there are four iambic feet in the metrical line, which contrasts the first, fifth and seventh line of each stanza. Meter: 'Song (When I am dead, my dearest)' uses a trimeter (there are three metrical feet in each line) apart from the third line of each stanza where there's a metrical deviation.This even structure reinforces the confidence and self-awareness of the persona. Rossetti structured the poem in two regular stanzas which have eight lines each.What kinds of poetic forms are expected of female authors?Ĥ. Where do Christina Rossetti's views dovetail or diverge from those of her brother?ģ. How does Christina Rossetti react against and borrow from the romantic tradition?Ģ. Rossetti then asserts the simple claim - though not a self-evident one for Wordsworth, at least - that a woman's lived experience is her own.ġ. It is this element of control that gladdens the speaker even when considering the grim prospect of her death. Rossetti's speaker will remember or forget on her own terms. In other words, while Wordsworth privileges the male poet, Rossetti returns her experience to her own auspices. ![]() Whereas Wordsworth's speaker meditates on his lover as an occasion to explore the ironies of his naiveté and subsequent demystification, Rossetti's speaker points toward her future senselessness as a chance to disrupt the male mourner and his attempt to make her into an object of poetic regard. Having said this, these poems use this awareness to drastically different effects. ![]() Perhaps the greatest commonality between these poems is their recognition of how death deprives the organic body of its sensibility. Rossetti's speaker is not only indifferent to her would-be mourner's loss, but she is even "happy" with her own post-mortem status as an inanimate object. The poem closes by revising the end of the first stanza from the second to the first person: "Haply I may remember, / And haply may forget" (lines 15-16). Like Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal," Rossetti's "Song" undergoes a dramatic shift in its second stanza. ![]() The conditional, "if," commits the speaker's mourners to neither remembering nor forgetting she obviates the need for poetic expression of male suffering. Rossetti's speaker goes so far as to dismiss, out of hand, the entire gesture of Wordsworth's reverie for Lucy: "And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget" (lines 7-8). Rossetti's female speaker abjures melancholy poetry and the male conventions of memorialization: Given Rossetti's status as a female poet, it is tenable to conjecture that she reverses the gender roles. Rather, the departed woman, assumedly, addresses her soon to be grieving lover. The speaker is not a man reliving the loss of a beloved woman. Lucy's status as an inanimate object arises concomitantly with the speaker's dispelled slumber he comes to realize the trajectory of "earth's diurnal course" through Lucy's transformation from life to death.Ĭhristina Rossetti's "Song" ("When I am dead, my dearest") immediately departs from Wordsworth's example. Lucy's "seeming" immortality is as fleeting as her condition as a "thing" is permanent. The foreboding suggested by how Lucy "seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years" (lines 3-4), only retrospective finds its dreadful significance. The "now" of the second stanza situates the reverie of the first stanza firmly in the past. As Paul de Man has argued in "The Rhetorical of Temporality," the second stanza circumscribes the naive perspective of the first. Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal" is perhaps best known for its ironic reversal. The unadorned rhymes give each work an air of simple, yet direct poetic statement. Hristina Rossetti's "Song" ("When I am dead, my dearest") has several points in common with Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal." On a basic level, revity and plainness of expression characterize both poems.
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