Neither ‘Remember’ nor ‘Sonnet’ have settings. They do not have times, or places. In both cases, one person is talking to the other about the relationship and in a sense, the reader feels love acts chiefly as a form of setting in place of a true one. In ‘How do I love thee’, the writer describes in detail how she loves and exploring the paths and ways of love. In ‘Remember’ she is rationally thinking of how her lover will cope when she is gone. It is not easy to label ‘Remember’ as a love poem. Both of the sonnets are connected with love but in ‘Sonnet’ it is a direct link whereas in ‘Remember’, the focus is more on subjects remotely connected with love such as forgetfulness, ‘forget me for a while’ and remembrance, ‘remember me’. It does not once directly mention love while ‘Sonnet’ mentions it almost every line. Yet, the reader can detect a link to love from the tenderness of the tone.
In ‘Remember’ the tone is detached and calm. There is punctuation at the end of lines, giving it a distinct feel of containment and control. Enjambment is infrequent and the lines end clearly marking the ends of phrases instead of carrying on giving it a sense of flow. It feels wholly emotionally controlled. ‘Gone far away’ is an example of tenderness and sadness that really reflects the complete tone of the piece. This evokes a feeling of past love and past cares. The entire tone of the sonnet is firm and controlled. ‘Do not grieve’ is a sad and tender command or wish that bares no passion – just sorrow.
In ‘Sonnet’ however, the piece seems to overflow with emotion and so much passion it provides the complete opposite to ‘Remember’. The reader gets the feeling that the writer is desperate for ways to illustrate all the hows of her love, running out of superlative enough words to fully explain the depth, power and passion of this love. The lines run on revealing how her love is continuous and flowing completely in contrast with the controlled calm structural tone of the other. Punctuation is used rarely and randomly giving the effect that the whole aspect and tone of the poem is impassioned upon this love that it is repetitive throughout the sonnet.
Imagery is used as a main component in ‘Sonnet’ but is not used as much in the other. Death is a strongly visible image within ‘Remember’ even though actual words connected with this –dead, death, die- are not literally used themselves. Lines one to three completely deal with the element of death. Lines five and six hint that Rossetti and her lover were to be married showing their love for one another and lines nine to fourteen are Rossetti’s instructions that her lover move on with his life and not dwell on her death because she would rather he ‘….forget and smile….than remember and be sad.’ This could be a symbol of death that is the main cause of the sorrowful tender tone of the poem. The dark spirited tone that reverberates within Christina Rossetti’s poem could be the impact of death upon lives. Death imagery is used to show how the speaker is being drawn away from her lover. It is the experience that everyone is guaranteed. In the end everyone dies and this inevitability of death is the reason for the sadness and tenderness of the poem. The shadowy language that the writer uses to refer to this, elucidate her individual perception of death. The term ‘silent land’ in this piece could be metaphorical imagery for eternal life. The writer may have used this symbolism instead of heaven or hell because her individual beliefs about the afterlife meant that she did not know which eternal life she was to reside in. The remembrance imagery that echoes throughout gives a feeling of distance as the reader is made aware of the time distance that the speaker is talking about. The writer uses a metaphor in line one where she writes, ‘Remember me when I am gone away’, with the metaphor being ‘gone away’ in place of dead. The third metaphor of the poem is found in line eleven, ‘For if the darkness and corruption leave’, using ‘darkness and corruption’ as a metaphor for anger and emotional pain or grief at her death.
In ‘Sonnet’ there is a great usage of imagery. The piece is based around the hows of her love, therefore imagery is used to explore the many ways of how a person can love or be loved. Religious imagery acts as a strong component in Barrett Browning’s sonnet. Through her life she was devoutly religious and within many of her works, her yearning for poetry to be made holy and to have Christ’s touch upon English literature is very apparent. Many religious images are created through phrases such as, ‘ideal grace’, ‘praise’, ‘lost saints’ and ‘if God choose’ illustrating how firmly her Christian faith carried her on through her life. It is well known how her childhood existence consisted almost entirely of continuous suffering. Firstly through her ill health, then through grief over loss of a sibling at a young age, and following that a seven yearlong period of seclusion as a invalid in her father’s house in a weak and unstable state both physically and mentally. So here she demonstrates the importance her faith was to her and how through her ‘old griefs’ and with her ‘childhood’s faith’ she clung on through her social repression and retained the love that she expresses so passionately. The reference to her childhood represents strength of purity and innocence in this love that is spoken of. Not only does the piece sustain religious images and expressions of religious faith, it also contains political, spatial, emotional, continual and eternal imagery. Politics were at a great height during her time as a writer and valued highly by society around her, so forming images of her love equal to the political way in which ‘men strive for right’ is a definite technique to clearly demonstrate love. Spatial imagery is used to create the feel of the boundaries of her love as the speaker emphasises that she will love to ‘the depth…breadth…height…soul can reach’. Describing how she loves with the ‘breath’, ‘smiles’, and ‘tears’ is symbolic emotional imagery justifying the magnitude of the love’s intensity with reference to lasting emotions from when she was a child –when strength of feeling existed about which an adult would consider trivial - all through her period of unbalance as an adult kept away from the world, basing it closely around her personal experiences. The writer also uses ‘soul’ and ‘ends of being’ imagery to symbolise eternity and to demonstrate the continuity of such a sentiment.
The pace of these two pieces is one distinct difference between the two pre 1914 sonnets. In Rossetti’s poem, the momentum is generally slow and unemotional. The amount of punctuation is substantial and this is significant to the tempo at which the piece is read. The speed is greatly slowed if many pauses in the literature have to be taken and read correctly. There are long vowels ensuring a high quality of sound however the piece is impassionate and solemn throughout. After the octet, the piece speeds up a little at the Volta signalled by, ‘Yet if you should,’ to give a more efficient effect of the change in thought and the sudden logic in the mind of the speaker but the writing returns to its calm and sedate nature for the last four lines. In definite collation, ‘Sonnet’ has a quick spirited impression to it and its tempo coincides with its subject matter so that the desperate full flowing passionate love shines through the passionate quick paced speed that the piece is read and understood at. The line ends that flow on beyond the end of phrase supplying a feel of continuity – unlike the over punctuated stops at each end of each line in the other ‘Sonnet’- are signs of the ongoing motion of the writing.
Neither piece contains alliteration, therefore the difference in pace is even more apparent. With some form of alliteration, the language in ‘Remember’ would be profoundly linked together and would gain a more natural course to link up it’s phrases, broken by punctuation. ‘Sonnet’ would gain further flow to continue its poetical motion and the difference would not be so great between the two seeing as they would both have flowing connected language.
Both poems have simple language, structure and not very much poetic diction. In Rossetti’s poem however, although she uses simple words, the repetition causes confusion. Playing around with word arrangement –‘remember….forget….remember’ can confuse the reader slightly. The transfer from positive to negative and back again can cause the reader to become overwhelmed by the twists that the writer is manifesting within the sonnet. Iambic pentameter supplies individual characterisation for the lover and the speaker in ‘Remember’ but in ’Sonnet’, there is none whatsoever. In ‘Remember, although it is a love poem there is only one reference to love and it is metaphorical, ‘a vestige of thoughts’ where it symbolises love. In contrast, in ‘Sonnet’, there are direct references to love itself as the word is literally and not metaphorically repeated almost every line. In Barrett Browning’s poem, she draws upon words of religion emphatically to describe and liken her love to show how she worships him ‘with a love….seemed to lose with…lost saints’ as a god or idol. In ‘Sonnet’, the writer’s emphatic use of the word ‘and’ leads to the sonnet to show similarity to a list in sharp differentiation with how ‘Remember’ is structured like a plea or an account of thoughts addressed to a lover.
Rossetti’s ‘Remember’ has an unusual rhyme scheme –abbaabbacddece- that is Petrachan except for the last two lines, with particular words rhyming with each other because together they make logical sense. The rhyme pattern means that ‘grieve’ and ‘leave’ go together, which works out since she is leaving and the lover left behind is grieving. Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnet’ however has a perfectly conventional Petrachan sonnet rhyming scheme –abbaabbadedede-, which could be a reflection on the perfection of the love described in the sonnet itself.
The message displayed within ‘Sonnet’ could be about ways or quantity that love can be shown. The poem altogether is truly a public declaration of love and the message could be showing how many ways love can be illustrated. The Sonnet’s entire theme is the depth of a woman’s love, reaching the absolute fullness of human expression. The sonnet glows with rapture, is exquisite in expression and perfect in its form. It owns no hesitancy in its utterance and shows the writer –Elizabeth Barrett Browning- at her highest : with the unity of the poem precise and definite, she has risen to almost the perfection of delightful song. The message alternatively however could be a specific idea about the relationship between mortality and love. In the fourteenth line of the sonnet, she describes how she will ‘love…better after Death’, directly announcing her belief that the intensity of the passionate love that she feels will not only be sustained through death, but will improve and have lasting vigour. ‘Remember’ could act as the complete opposite opinion to this as the idea concerning this mortality/love relationship is that the grave instantly cuts off passion. After death, love is over and cannot continue as is reflected through the subject matter of the poem as the ‘darkness and corruption’ comes and the speaker is forced to be ‘gone away’ and remembered as nothing more but a memory. It is particularly odd that Christina Rossetti holds this view or at least displays as such in her poem considering she held very strong religious moralistic views about death and the afterlife. Both poems when compared together, form two exceptionally separate theoretical ideas about the outcome of love after the eventual onset of death.
I feel that the beauty of ‘Remember’ is that it is both simple in language and word choice, and complex in idea, but at the same time allows the reader a full understanding of its complexities and simplicities. Rossetti wrote this sonnet to teach all who read it that death is inevitable but it should not consume the lives of those who are left living. Although I appreciate Rossetti’s dexterity as she creates imagery to portray the situation of the parting of her and her lover, I cannot enjoy the piece thoroughly as I strongly feel the absence of emotion in the piece. The tone is sad and tender, but there is no sorrow or passion. It is a love poem but I cannot experience the love through reading the words. To completely understand and accept a poem, I need to feel the emotion. Christina Rossetti’s poem is expressed well however I prefer Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem ‘Sonnet. I feel that it is the true epitome of a love poem, with the heart pouring out emotions into the very words. The writer is definitely a poet who writes from the heart and perhaps from personal experience. After suffering seven long years repressed as an invalid under her father’s control, the poem appears to be all feelings unleashed upon the one man –Robert Browning her husband- who rescued her soul from that miserable existence. I can sense the fervour in which the poem has been written alongside great sincerity and passion. I love the way in which simple words echo when the piece is read aloud and the ‘passion’ of line nine shines rapturously throughout. The many forms of imagery within the poem bring it to life, demonstrating what emotional poetry really means. The conventional Petrachan sonnet form in which it is written has full potential power to create an intense outburst of emotion. Here, the reader is captured completely by the effortless beauty formed by the love described within the poem.
‘Remember’ and ‘Sonnet’ both appear from the outside to be similar in structure, theme and texture however the depths discovered when the reader takes a closer look reveal strong differences that clearly distinguish Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem from Christina’s Rossetti’s.