Men and women have very different ways of expressing their attitudes to love and relationships discuss this reference to at least six poems studied.

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12th January 2004                                                                                       Raheem Hussain

Men and women have very different ways of expressing their attitudes to love and relationships discuss this reference to at least six poems studied.

     The sonnet “Remember” by Christina Rossetti was written in 1849 when Rossetti was just 19 years old, in this sonnet the themes of love, loss, and reaction to death are portrayed. Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830 and died in 1894 a well-known poet. The sonnet, “Remember”, is written to a lover and is about their love, her death, and how she wants him to react to her death.

     The poem starts of with lines one to three deals with the element of death, Rossetti uses a metaphor in line one when she states,

             “Remember me when I am gone away”,

The metaphor being gone away instead of the word dead gives us the idea that she is she does not want her lover to think of her as being dead but gone away, this idea is also illustrated with the use of another metaphor,

              “Gone far away into the silent land”,

Here there is a usage of the term the silent land instead of eternal life illustrating that she is going far away.

       With the usage of a metaphor on line eleven Rossetti tells her lover that he should not be saddened by her death, she states,

              “And afterwards remember, do not grieve;

                For if the darkness and corruption leave”

Rossetti uses darkness and corruption as a metaphor for anger at her death and she believes that her lover should not be angered and he should carry on his life in an ordinarily manner.    

   As the poem goes on it portrays the idea that 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, this is shown when she states,  

              “Better by far you should forget and smile

                That you should remember and be sad”

This shows that she wrote this sonnet to her lover that and she believed he should not be upset if, after she died, he forgot about her because she would rather know that he is happy than that he is, in a sense, dead while alive.

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   In the poem ‘A Woman to her Lover’ the woman is telling her lover whom has just proposed to her what she will and will not be. In lines 3-7 the woman says to her lover

                       “To make of me a bond slave

                         To bear you children, wearing out my life

                         In drudgery and silence

                ...

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