As I read the second line of Remember, the phase “silent land” really caught my attention. I couldn’t understand the meaning at first, however after reading a few times I realize it was a metaphor for death. Rossetti was a religious women and believed in going to heaven after death, when she wrote this poem she has accepted that she is on the border of death, almost like she was happy to be reunited with god. In the poem Remember, Rossetti goes against the Victorian rules at that time by writing about death and pain, which mirrors the Pre-Raphaelite ideologies.
Death and a change of the heart
In Plena Timoris, the poem begins with a romantic setting “The lovers looked over the parapet-stone”, a very traditional scene for lovers. This is further enhanced by more description of the environment and more lively details, “Her ear-rings twinkled; her teeth, too, shone”. We can see that the couple gets more intimate when the man puts “his arm around her, they laughed and leant”. Death was never in the lovers minds until the unanticipated tragedy happened.
The description of the bridge has given detail of the lovers in the moonlight, “the moon” can symbolize both love and death, it can represent the mythology of the moon or a more sinister, more distant, more mysterious side. The moon can be seen as the symbol of ghosts and spirits, which is soon reflected when it for shadows the death of a woman later on.
“climbed over, slid down, let go”, this triplet illustrated the determination and the abruptness of the act. The unanticipated suicide of the woman ended the previous romantic image. Death griped the thoughts. “Drowned herself for love of a man”, “So much for the love in this mortal sphere”. This woman’s death immediately made the girl realize how similar the woman’s situation was to hers. “The girl’s heart shuddered; it seemed as to freeze her”. The word “shuddered” is used as an onomatopoeia as it highlighted the immediate and sudden change in her feelings. The caesura introduced a pause in the sentence and grabs the reader’s attention.
The death of another woman gradually shifted the girl’s mind to the darker side of a relationship. “Dim dreads of the future grew slowly to seize her”. She seemed willing to forgo a happy relationship for the thought of a possible future despair and death - “her hand dropt from his as they wandered away”. “wandered away” are very precise words hinting the lack of sense of direction in their relationship.
Plena Timoris is a poem with mainly a slow moving narrative and a rhyme pattern of ABBAB. However sometimes even the two A’s are not perfect, for example, in the first stanza “parapet stone” and “shone” are only half rhyme’s. The poem thus has certain words in lines that don’t ‘fit’. Hardy used this imperfection to show that sometimes love is not what it seems and it can foreshadow the tragedy that is to happen.
Death in a world of suffering
Written in the Biafra war in 1967, the poem Refugee Mother and Child by Chinua Achebe deals with the deaths of more than 1 million people, adults and children that have died in battle or from starvation. Refugee Mother and Child is about the suffering of the people in Nigeria for African independence. To people who suffers every moment of their life, death is not entirely unwelcome. Refugee Mother and Child uses an opening tercet that describes the tenderness in a mother watching her dying son. “No Madonna and Child could touch that picture of a mother’s tenderness for a son she soon would have to forget”. Tenderness is a big contrast to the more commonly used words such as “sadness”, “anguish” in the face of death.
Refugee Mother and Child brings many fairly negative, distorted and depressing images to ones attention. “The air was heavy with odours of diarrhoea of unwashed children”, this olfactory imagery clearly makes the reader feel disgust and not wanting to be there. “washed-out ribs and dried-up bottoms”, “blown empty bellies”, engages the audience into the scene and makes them imagine clearly how horrible the situation was, and makes them feel sympathy for the mother.
Achebe also used many words with the “O” sound, “blown”, “ghost”, “bottom”, these help the poem in two ways. First it slows the pace of reading, allowing more attentions to the words. Secondly, by using the sound commonly used by human in sadness (when people are upset, people tends to make “O” sounds, “Oh Dear”, “Boo Hoo”), when I read this I felt as if Achebe brought my senses into reading the poem. It really helped to adds emotion and power to the poem.
As I read on in Refugee Mother and Child I started to realize that not only enjambment was used but also the number of words on each line was getting shorter and shorter. At the end, the line was only 4 words long, “on a tiny grave.” As the lines get shorter I felt as if Achebe was trying to portray the life escaping out of the child’s body. The advantage of writing in short lines is that
more emphasis can be put on one word, for example in the metaphor “like putting flowers on a tiny grave” it emphasized on the word “tiny” to show how small and fragile the child was when he died.
Achebe uses a lot of words related human anatomy such as “bottom”, “skull”, “eyes” “ribs” and “bellies” these give the reader imagery of a child made out of only bone and skin. He has used the word “ribs” shows that the child is undernourished and famished. This exaggerated description engages the reader as if they themselves are watching the tragedy before their own eyes.
In Refugee Mother and Child the poet mentions the "ghost smile", she tries to express that there once was a "smile between her teeth", but now it is slowly fading just like a ghost, but something still remains, she still remembers or longs for "her mothers pride" The word ghost foreshadows death. This line is effective because it uses a simile and it has strong imagery.
Something that really struck me as I was reading Refugee Mother and Child was that Achebe has used singing in an interesting way. “singing in her eyes” uses both metaphor and personification and can also be interpreted in two different ways. One way people can see it is as an act of happiness and grace as the mother can be relieved that her child doesn’t have to suffer
the hostile environment and letting his soul lead on to a better afterlife. However a totally different view on the act is the mother giving her final gift to her child by singing requiem for him.
In conclusion, I would say the three poems are so similar yet can be seen as extremely different. The poems all seem to focus on the themes of love and death, however the poems do not have the same perspectives and insight, an example of this is the abrupt change in the mood in Plena Timoris as a result of an unanticipated death contrasts with the constant thoughts of death in Remember. The theme of love and death is often represented by the poet’s use of repetition, metaphors and the way the have structured their poems.
