Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you plann’d: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Glossary · Related Poems
Summary
A woman who expects to die soon speaks to the person she loves. Remember me, she says, when I am gone — when you can no longer hold my hand or tell me about the future we planned. Then, halfway through, she changes her mind. If you happen to forget me for a while and only later remember, do not feel guilty. In fact, she concludes, it would be better for you to forget me and be happy than to remember me and be sad. The poem begins as a plea to be remembered and ends by releasing the beloved from the duty of remembering at all. It is one of the most quietly generous poems about death in English, and far stranger than its popularity at funerals suggests.
Background
Christina Rossetti wrote “Remember” in 1849, when she was only nineteen, and published it in 1862 in Goblin Market and Other Poems, the volume that made her name. The poem is now a fixture at funerals, read as a straightforward plea from the dead to the living: do not forget me. That reading misses what the poem actually does, and misses that it was written by a teenager imagining her own death rather than by a grieving survivor.
Rossetti was a devout High Anglican, and death is everywhere in her work, usually shadowed by the promise of resurrection. What is striking about “Remember” is how little of that promise it offers. There is a “silent land” and a mention of prayer, but no heaven, no reunion, no consolation of the soul living on. The poem stays almost entirely on this side of the grave, concerned not with the speaker’s fate but with the feelings of the person left behind. That restraint is the first sign that this is not the simple memorial poem it gets used as.
Analysis and Themes
The whole power of “Remember” lies in a single reversal. It opens as an insistent demand to be remembered and ends by giving that demand away, and the turn between the two is the most moving thing in the poem. To read it as a plea for eternal remembrance is to read only its first half and stop before the part that makes it remarkable.
A Plea That Reverses Itself
Listen to how the first eight lines hammer the request: “Remember me” opens the poem, opens line five, and returns as “Only remember me” in line seven. Three times in eight lines the speaker asks not to be forgotten, and the repetition has the quality of someone pressing a point they are afraid will not hold. Then comes the turn, on the word “Yet”: “Yet if you should forget me for a while.” Everything changes direction. The speaker who just begged to be remembered now imagines being forgotten and, instead of protesting, offers comfort: do not grieve. By the final two lines she has reversed herself completely, preferring the beloved’s forgetful happiness to his faithful sorrow. The poem argues itself out of its own opening demand, and watching it do so in real time is the experience the sonnet is built to deliver.
The Generosity of Being Forgotten
The closing couplet contains the whole moral of the poem: “Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad.” This is the opposite of what a sentimental death poem says. It treats remembrance not as a gift to the dead but as a possible burden on the living, and it chooses to lift that burden. Real love, the speaker decides, would rather the survivor be happy than dutifully mournful — even if the price of that happiness is being forgotten. But notice the strain in the generosity. The octave’s threefold insistence has already told us the speaker very much does want to be remembered; the release in the sestet is hard-won, an act of will rather than indifference. The tenderness of the poem is in the effort it takes to mean “forget me,” not in any pretence that forgetting would be easy to accept.
The Silent Land
For a poet as religious as Rossetti, the poem’s account of death is startlingly bare. Death is “the silent land,” a place of going away and of hands no longer held. What survives is described in the faintest possible terms: not a soul in heaven but merely “a vestige of the thoughts that once I had,” and even that is conditional, something that might or might not outlast “the darkness and corruption” of the grave. There is no reunion promised, no comfort of eternity, only the slim, uncertain trace a person leaves in someone else’s mind. By withholding the religious consolation she could easily have supplied, Rossetti keeps the poem honest about loss, and makes the speaker’s generosity toward the living matter more, because it is offered without the safety net of a guaranteed afterlife.
Form and Technique
“Remember” is a Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet in iambic pentameter, and the form is not decoration — it is the argument. The Petrarchan sonnet divides into an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, with a turn, or volta, between them. Rossetti puts her reversal exactly on that hinge: the octave (rhyming ABBAABBA, with only two rhyme sounds, as the strict Italian form demands) makes the plea to be remembered; the sestet (rhyming CDDECE) takes it back. The structure of the poem and the movement of its thought are the same shape. Anyone wanting to see why poets bother with the sonnet’s rules could start here: the meaning turns where the form turns.
The diction is plain almost to the point of bareness — short, common words, very few images, no display. That restraint is deliberate and is the poem’s great strength; it sounds like a person speaking quietly rather than a poet performing. The one moment of pure technical beauty is line four: “Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.” The line hovers on its own indecision, “turn” against “turning,” “go” against “stay,” enacting in its rhythm the reluctance of someone who cannot quite leave. It is a small masterpiece of hesitation, and it tells you the speaker’s eventual willingness to be forgotten costs her something real.
Notable Lines
Three moments mark the arc from plea to hesitation to release.
Remember me when I am gone away,
Lines 1–2
Gone far away into the silent land;
The opening establishes both the plea and the poem’s gentle refusal to name death directly. “Gone away” and “the silent land” are euphemisms, but tender ones, and the repetition of “gone” lets the distance widen as the line moves.
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Line 4
The most beautiful line in the sonnet. It captures the impossible reluctance of leaving — already going, still turning back — in a single hovering motion. The whole poem’s feeling is compressed into it.
Better by far you should forget and smile
Lines 13–14
Than that you should remember and be sad.
The closing reversal and the poem’s heart. After all the asking, the speaker chooses the beloved’s happiness over her own claim on his memory. The balanced antithesis — forget and smile, remember and be sad — makes the choice sound calm, but the calm is the achievement, not the starting point.
Glossary
A few terms whose weight is easy to miss:
- the silent land (line 2) — death, or the realm of the dead; a quiet euphemism rather than a named heaven or grave.
- corruption (line 11) — the physical decay of the body after death, not moral corruption.
- vestige (line 12) — a faint trace or remnant; here, the slight remainder of the speaker’s mind that might survive in the beloved’s memory.
Related Poems
If this poem moves you, these three turn the same way — each one a message to the living about how to grieve.
- Song (“When I am dead, my dearest”) by Christina Rossetti — the twin of “Remember,” also spoken by a dying woman who frees her beloved from mourning: “And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget.” Read them together to see Rossetti working the same idea two ways.
- Sonnet 71 (“No longer mourn for me when I am dead”) by William Shakespeare — the great earlier instance of a speaker telling the beloved to forget him rather than suffer, and the clearest ancestor of Rossetti’s gesture.
- Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep by Mary Elizabeth Frye — the modern funeral favourite that shares the same core move: comforting the bereaved by releasing them from grief, though in a far plainer, more consoling register.