Memory by Christina Rossetti

First published: 1866, in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Memory” is a poem of thirty-six lines expressing a woman’s voluntary renunciation of love, which, remembered with wrenching self-abnegation in life, will be consummated with her beloved in an afterlife of perfect fulfillment.

Part 1 of the poem was written in 1857, and part 2 came into being in 1865, when Christina Rossetti was at the height of her creative powers. The sister of the two Pre-Raphaelite writer-artists, Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti, Christina gave expression to some of the escapist Pre-Raphaelite tendencies in her own poetry. She had, however, a uniquely religious sensibility, influenced by her intense involvement with the Anglo-Catholic movement within the Victorian Church of England. One of the greatest English religious poets of the nineteenth century, she strove for a disciplined purity in her daily life, giving up not only theater, opera, and chess, but even two suitors for her hand in marriage because of her scruples about the beliefs of one man and the lukewarm piety of the other.

“Memory” is a striking testimony to a woman’s conscious rejection of love in her life, a courageous choice alleviated only by remembrance of her love and by the hope that the relationship will be renewed in paradise. The five stanzas of part 1 stress the woman’s loneliness and courage in her choice to renounce love and yet to hide it in her hollow heart where it once gave joy. She has always kept her love a secret, and its renunciation required a stoically cool objectivity in the wrenching process of her rigorous self-examination and exorcism of love in this life. Nevertheless, her chilling choice to forgo romance in life has broken her heart, which gradually dies within her and causes her to age prematurely.

The four stanzas of part 2 examine the aftermath of her choice and elaborate on the single optimistic note of part 1—that love survived in the woman’s memory despite the decision to reject romance: “I hid it within my heart when it was dead” (line 2). Part 2 affirms the enduring vitality of her supposedly dead love in the hiding place of her heart, where romantic memories reign over her existence through cold winters and splendid summers. Although she no longer worships a love that is “buried yet not dead” to her (line 30), in the autumn of her life, she indulges in romantic memories and dreams of a consummation of her love-longing in a paradise of love.

Forms and Devices

“Memory,” a lyric poem consisting of nine four-line stanzas termed quatrains, has a rhyme scheme of abab in part 1 and abba in part 2. It is noteworthy that in part 2 the initial and final lines of each stanza end with the same feminine (or weak) rhyme, in keeping with the sense of the poem’s conclusion that the woman’s stoic renunciation of love has softened into tender remembrance and a fond hope of eventual reunion beyond the grave.

In part 1, the prevailing meter is iambic pentameter (“ǐ nuřsed ǐt ín my bósǒm whíle ǐt líved”), although the last line of each stanza employs iambic trimeter (“ǎlóne ǎd nóthiňg sáid”). In part 2, the metrical system in each stanza alternates between iambic pentameter (with an extra short sound on the feminine end rhyme in the first line of each stanza) and iambic dimeter (with an extra short sound on the feminine end rhyme in the last line of each stanza):

I have a room whereinto no one enters   Save I myself alone:There sits a blessed memory on a throne,   There my life centres.

Cooperating with this appropriately controlled but fluctuating sound system is an abundance of assonance and consonance in the poem (“I nursed it in my bosom while it lived”).

To underscore the contrast between experienced love and deferred love, the poem employs the earthier metaphor of having formerly “nursed” a vital love in the “bosom” in contrast to the chaster, more literal equivalent of having now “hid” a dead love in the “heart” (line 2). There are other metaphors, such as “the perfect balances” to convey the cold objectivity of the woman’s judgment in renouncing earthly love (lines 9-12), such as “the bloodless lily and warm rose” to suggest the seasons and her lingering love (lines 27-28), or such as “life’s autumn weather” to indicate her aging process (line 33).

The poem verges on allegory, a literary form that tells a story strong on meaning rather than on narrative, capitalizing on personified abstractions rather than on concrete symbols, characters, and events. Thus, the woman must contend with the personified abstractions of “truth” (lines 5-6), the “idol” love (lines 15, 17), and “a blessed memory on a throne” in her heart (line 23), where her life centers—without sinful idolatry—and where her buried love still lives (lines 24, 29-32). All this is a semiallegorical dramatization of the woman’s inner psychology of love deferred through self-discipline.

The poem is terse and elliptically understated in its severe language. The diction is monosyllabic and bare-boned in its simplicity to convey the stoic determination to withhold love in life for a perfect consummation of romance in the hereafter.