preview

Compare and Contrast the ways in which Christina Rossetti communicates her attitudes towards death in “Song” and “Remember”

Good Essays

Compare and Contrast the ways in which Christina Rossetti communicates her attitudes towards death in “Song” and “Remember” ________________________________________________________________ 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 …show more content…

However, it could be interpreted that here, Rossetti is again playing with the idea of guilt, and that she puts on this apathy in order to leave her partner in limbo to whether to forget or remember her. Perhaps this is her ploy to make him feel the guilt of trying to control her and through doing so, he will realise his wrongs, and thus been controlled by her, which you could argue as being her object, as the ultimate form of revenge. Rossetti also addresses the idea of religion in both “Song” and “Remember” which broadens her portrayal of her attitudes towards death. In “Song”, as already discussed, Rossetti rejects convention in her pragmatic approach to death, but also consciously rebuffs the traditional religious views of the time. There is no sense of celestial bliss or heaven in her mention of what death will be like, with no mention of a desire for a ceremony. She deliberately talks of her partner being “the green grass above me”, which shows that she has no belief of her dead body ascending into a divine afterlife, but rather staying firmly buried under the ground. Rossetti thus rejects the Pre-Raphaelites’ Anglican moral influences by her subversive reference to the afterlife. She writes of how she will be “dreaming through the twilight”, and given our

Get Access