The Speaker (Rossetti)

Rossetti narrates her own poem from a first-person, singular perspective. She establishes herself as a speaker of quiet confidence, primarily based on her assurance that the remembrance of her life after her death will be, in reality, a gradual process of forgetting. For Rossetti, this forgetting is an established matter of not “if,” but when, with the only conditionals occurring at the end of the poem: “if you should forget me for a while / And afterwards remember” and “if the darkness and corruption leave / A vestige of the thoughts that once I had” (9-12). In this way, Rossetti portrays herself as possessing a powerful sense of foreknowledge, thereby establishing her as a source of quiet and steady wisdom. At the same time, Rossetti also demonstrates a high degree of decisiveness – despite her depiction of inevitable forgetfulness, she takes on the agency of providing post-mortem instructions for...