The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Rossetti, Christina. “Remember” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45000/remember-56d224509b7ae.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Christina Rossetti was an English poet born in 1830 in London to a highly intellectual family. Her father was Gabriele Rosseti, a poet and exile from Italy, and her mother was Frances Polidori, the sister of Doctor John Polidori, Lord Byron’s friend and physician. They welcomed the influence of Italian writers, such as Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), and educated Christina Rossetti with religious works, classics, fairy tales, and novels. Christina Rossetti’s brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is also remembered today as an iconic Victorian poet as well as a founding and leading member of the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of painters who rejected the academic style of art to create their own style – they sought to amplify the details of everyday life with bright colors, giving their paintings a fantastical and magical quality. While Christina herself was not a painter, she modeled for several of Dante’s paintings and was also the subject of some of his sketches. Later, in the face of her father’s ailing health, Rossetti began to suffer from depression. As a way to cope, Rossetti and the other women in her family turned to the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Anglican Church, whose influence can be found in much of Rossetti’s lyric poetry.

Christina Rossetti is best remembered for writing children’s poetry and devotional poetry. Her most famous work is “Goblin Market,” a fairytale written in poetry about two sisters who save each other from the temptation of fruit sold by the goblins in the woods they inhabit. Behind the the fantastical elements typical to children’s storytelling found in “Goblin Market,” however, Rossetti hides powerful themes like redemptive sisterhood, religious temptation, the threatening materialism of capitalism, sexual economy, and gender roles. Similarly, Rossetti’s devotional poetry, which includes “Remember,” uses a similar strategy of masking complex messages behind seeming simplicity. Underneath Rossetti’s plainspoken and succinct lyricism, she conveys moving messages of loss, death, love, grief, and memory.

As a general note, poetic convention means that the speaker of a poem should not be conflated with the voice and views of the author of a poem. However, Rossetti’s intensely lyrical focus on her own personal experiences in the first-person within her devotional poetry poses an arguable exception to this poetic convention. Therefore, throughout this study guide, the speaker of the poem will be referred to as “Rossetti” rather than as “the speaker.”