Compare and Contrast the ways in which Christina Rossetti communicates her attitudes towards death in “Song” and “Remember”
Compare and Contrast the ways in which Christina Rossetti communicates her attitudes towards death in “Song” and “Remember”
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In both “Song” and “Remember”, Rossetti conveys her own attitudes towards death through writing about how others should treat her death and how she wants to be remembered, respectively. She addresses important ideas as well as using word choice and the metrical template to paint a clear picture of her perceptions of death.
As a poet, Rossetti uses her choice and form of words as a way of conveying her initial feelings towards death.
In “Song” the tone is immediately set by the ingenuous and candid first line, “When I am dead my dearest”. It portrays a surprisingly pragmatic approach to death on behalf of the poet and demonstrates an emotionally detached attitude to it, believing that it is inevitable; hence she does not disguise the subject of this poem in clichéd euphemism. The rest of the verse develops this, where she uses imperatives, “Sing”, “Plant” and “Be”, stressed at the beginnings of their lines, to show that she is adamant that her partner should dispense with all the conventional trappings of grief. The verse is heavily embellished in connotations of mourning, Rossetti making reference to as many symbols of it as she can, “roses at my head”, “sad songs” and a “cypress tree”, almost to satire the traditions of the day. Clearly, her views are that people should accept death as fated, although she also carries a tone of indifference as to what her partner should do, telling him that she does not mind whether he wishes to remember or forget her,
“And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget”. This apathy is just as effective as the orders to not grieve, as she rejects the traditional and overt emotional intensity of the Pre-Raphaelites, demonstrated in poems such as “The Blessed Damozel”, parodying them. She finishes the poem in this manner, using the
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In both “Song” and “Remember”, Rossetti conveys her own attitudes towards death through writing about how others should treat her death and how she wants to be remembered, respectively. She addresses important ideas as well as using word choice and the metrical template to paint a clear picture of her perceptions of death.
As a poet, Rossetti uses her choice and form of words as a way of conveying her initial feelings towards death.
In “Song” the tone is immediately set by the ingenuous and candid first line, “When I am dead my dearest”. It portrays a surprisingly pragmatic approach to death on behalf of the poet and demonstrates an emotionally detached attitude to it, believing that it is inevitable; hence she does not disguise the subject of this poem in clichéd euphemism. The rest of the verse develops this, where she uses imperatives, “Sing”, “Plant” and “Be”, stressed at the beginnings of their lines, to show that she is adamant that her partner should dispense with all the conventional trappings of grief. The verse is heavily embellished in connotations of mourning, Rossetti making reference to as many symbols of it as she can, “roses at my head”, “sad songs” and a “cypress tree”, almost to satire the traditions of the day. Clearly, her views are that people should accept death as fated, although she also carries a tone of indifference as to what her partner should do, telling him that she does not mind whether he wishes to remember or forget her,
“And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget”. This apathy is just as effective as the orders to not grieve, as she rejects the traditional and overt emotional intensity of the Pre-Raphaelites, demonstrated in poems such as “The Blessed Damozel”, parodying them. She finishes the poem in this manner, using the