Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Christina Rossetti was one of the most important Victorian poets. She was the sister of the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and grew up in a literary and artistic London family of Italian descent. She published her first poems at age 17 and became famous for her 1862 collection Goblin Market and Other Poems.
Faith
Rossetti was a devoted High Anglican Christian, and her religious faith shapes almost all her poetry. She wrote hymns (including "In the Bleak Midwinter"), devotional works and poems about death, resurrection and the soul. "Remember" is not explicitly religious but is informed by her Christian acceptance of death as a passage rather than an ending.
Biography: the broken engagements
Rossetti was engaged twice but never married. Her first engagement, to the painter James Collinson, was broken in 1850 when he converted back to Roman Catholicism. Her second engagement, to the scholar Charles Cayley, ended for similar religious reasons. Many critics read "Remember" as one of her many poems about lost love and the futures that never happened.
Date and publication
"Remember" was written in 1849, when Rossetti was just 19 years old, and published in 1862 in Goblin Market and Other Poems. Its remarkable maturity - a young woman imagining her own death and releasing her beloved from grief - astonished early readers.
Victorian death culture
The Victorians were famously preoccupied with death and mourning. Mourning had elaborate social rituals - black clothes, long periods of withdrawal, memorial portraits and hair jewellery. Rossetti's poem is striking because it resists these rituals. She does not want her beloved to be consumed by grief; she wants him to smile. This was a gentler, more modern view of mourning.
Place in the canon
"Remember" has become one of the most frequently read poems at funerals and memorial services. Its balance of grief and consolation, and its quiet permission to move on, make it one of the tenderest poems about dying in English.