The Death of the Heroine

Like much of Rossetti’s devotional poetry, one of her primary concerns is the human response to death. Unlike traditional works of the Western Canon, which portray death as a mythologized and fantastical adventure into the underworld where a male hero must encounter and fight off Hellish beasts (think of Dante’s journey through the nine levels of Hell in his Inferno) Rossetti presents a much more sedated and much less dramatic account of the experience of dying from the first lines of the poem. She speaks using the everyday pleasantries of euphemism: “Remember me when I am gone away” (1). Entering the realm of death is not presented as a frightfully heroic battle but in the language of routine and quotidian travel, although the final location and resting place is permanent and devoid of living physicality – “Gone far away into the silent...