When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget.
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Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines
Glossary · Related Poems
Summary
“Song (When I Am Dead, My Dearest)” is a two-stanza lyric spoken by a woman to the person she loves, telling him how she wishes to be treated after she dies. Her instructions are almost entirely refusals. She asks for no sad songs, no roses planted at her head, no shady cypress tree — none of the ceremony that Victorian culture wrapped around death. Plain green grass, kept fresh by rain and dew, will be tribute enough. Then comes the line that gives the poem its strange, gentle force: he is free to remember her, and equally free to forget.
The second stanza turns from the living world to the speaker’s own state once she is gone. She will not see the shadows, feel the rain, or hear the nightingale’s mournful song; she imagines instead a kind of endless twilight “that doth not rise nor set,” a rest outside of time. And in that dreaming half-sleep, she too may remember or may forget.
The poem ends not with grief or with faith in reunion, but with a quiet, deliberate uncertainty — a calm that has unsettled and consoled readers for over a century and a half.
Background
Rossetti wrote this poem in 1848, when she was only seventeen or eighteen years old, though it did not reach print until 1862, when it opened a place in Goblin Market and Other Poems, her first published volume. That a teenager produced so composed and unsentimental a meditation on her own death is part of the poem’s lasting fascination. It belongs to a strain that runs through Rossetti’s whole career: she returned to mortality, memory, and the uncertainty of what lies beyond death again and again, most famously in her sonnet “Remember,” written about a year later and often read as this poem’s twin.
The poem also speaks to its moment. Victorian England was elaborate, almost theatrical, in its mourning — strict dress codes, ornate monuments, prescribed periods of grief. Against that backdrop, a poem that politely declines roses, cypress, and sad songs reads as quietly subversive. Rossetti was a devout Anglican, and critics often connect the poem’s vision of death as a timeless “twilight” to the doctrine of “soul sleep,” the belief that the dead rest in a kind of suspension until a final awakening. Yet the poem never names heaven or resurrection; it leaves the question open, which is exactly what gives its serenity an edge. Its song-like shape — Rossetti even titles it simply “Song” — has since drawn numerous composers to set it to music.
Analysis and Themes
For a poem of only sixteen short lines, “Song” holds a surprising amount of tension. Its surface is calm and its requests are modest, but underneath runs a steady refusal of the things the living usually demand of the dead — and of the dead from the living. Four threads in particular reward a closer look.
A Quiet Refusal of Mourning
The first stanza is built almost entirely on negatives: “Sing no sad songs,” “Plant thou no roses,” “Nor shady cypress tree.” Each of these is a recognised emblem of Victorian grief — the funeral song, the rose of remembrance, the cypress that traditionally shades a grave. By declining them one after another, the speaker gently dismantles the whole apparatus of mourning. There is nothing bitter in the refusal; it is offered tenderly, to her “dearest.” But the cumulative effect is a real challenge to a culture that measured love by the visible weight of its grief.
Nature in Place of Monuments
What the speaker does want is strikingly plain: “Be the green grass above me / With showers and dewdrops wet.” In place of carved stone and cultivated flowers, she asks only for grass kept alive by rain and dew — the ordinary, renewing processes of the natural world. The contrast is pointed. Monuments are human attempts to fix memory in something permanent; grass and dew are humble, transient, and self-renewing. Rossetti quietly suggests that this is the more honest tribute, allowing her body to rejoin nature rather than be set apart from it by ornament.
The Freedom to Forget
The emotional heart of the poem is its refusal to bind the beloved: “And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget.” Most love poetry pleads to be remembered; the speaker instead hands her beloved permission to let her go. This is a far more generous and unusual gesture than it first appears. To insist on being remembered is, in a sense, to keep a claim on the living. By releasing that claim, the speaker offers a love defined not by demand but by freedom — and, perhaps, by a clear-eyed acceptance that the dead cannot police what the living feel.
Death as a Dreaming Twilight
In the second stanza the poem crosses over to the far side of death, and its imagery turns hushed and suspended: “dreaming through the twilight / That doth not rise nor set.” This is neither the bright heaven of Christian consolation nor the blank nothing of despair, but a third thing — a timeless, half-conscious rest.
The closing lines mirror the first stanza’s release back onto the speaker herself: “Haply I may remember, / And haply may forget.” Even she does not know whether memory survives. That open ending is the poem’s boldest move: it grants death a strange peace precisely by declining to promise anything certain about it.
Form and Technique
The poem’s title is also a description of its method: it is a “Song,” and Rossetti builds it on the alternating long-and-short lines of ballad and hymn measure, the rhythms English readers associate most deeply with music. Each of the two eight-line stanzas falls into quatrains rhyming on the even lines (an abcb pattern), so the rhyme arrives lightly, at the close of every couplet’s second line, like the resolution of a musical phrase. The metre rocks gently between four-beat and three-beat lines, which gives the whole poem a lulling, cradle-song motion entirely suited to a meditation on rest.
Repetition does much of the emotional work. The anaphora of “I shall not see… I shall not feel… I shall not hear” tolls through the second stanza like a slow bell, while the paired clauses “And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget” and “Haply I may remember, / And haply may forget” frame the poem’s central balance between holding on and letting go. Rossetti’s diction is deliberately archaic and plain — “thou wilt,” “doth,” “haply” — lending the voice a timeless, almost liturgical calm.
Soft, hushing sounds (the s, sh, and w of “Sing no sad songs,” “showers,” “shadows”) thread through the lines, muffling the poem as if it were already spoken from a great quiet. The mournful nightingale, meanwhile, glances back at Keats’s famous ode, a poet Rossetti read closely.
Notable Lines
“When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me” — The opening fuses tenderness and refusal in a single breath. The intimate address, “my dearest,” softens what is in fact an instruction, and sets the poem’s whole tone: loving, direct, and quietly unwilling to be mourned in the expected ways.
“And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget.” — The poem’s most quoted lines, and its emotional core. In place of the usual plea to be remembered, the speaker grants her beloved complete freedom. It is an act of release that reads as both selfless and faintly bracing.
“And dreaming through the twilight / That doth not rise nor set” — Rossetti’s image for death itself: not darkness, not light, but a suspended, timeless dusk. The line gives the poem its uncanny serenity and resists any neat doctrine about the afterlife.
“Haply I may remember, / And haply may forget.” — The closing couplet turns the first stanza’s gift of freedom back on the speaker. Even in death she claims no certainty about memory, ending the poem on a note of calm, open-ended doubt.
Glossary
- Cypress tree: A dark evergreen traditionally planted in graveyards and associated with mourning; Rossetti names it precisely in order to wave it away.
- Thou wilt: Archaic for “you wish” or “you will” — the old second-person form that gives the address its intimate, timeless register.
- Nightingale: A songbird long linked in poetry to melancholy and lament, and to Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” which Rossetti echoes here.
- Haply: Archaic for “perhaps” or “by chance” — the word on which the poem’s final uncertainty turns.
Related Poems
If this poem speaks to you, these explore the same territory of death, memory, and farewell:
- Remember by Christina Rossetti: The twin of this poem — a sonnet, written about a year later, that likewise frees a beloved to let go and forget.
- Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson: Another woman poet’s serene, almost companionable carriage ride toward dying.
- Crossing the Bar by Alfred Tennyson: A fellow Victorian’s calm address to death, imagined as a peaceful putting-out to sea.
- Death, Be Not Proud by John Donne: An earlier devotional sonnet that confronts death directly, dismissing it as a short sleep before waking.