Song: When I Am Dead My Dearest

• AO1: In ‘Song: When I am dead my dearest’, Rossetti explores… 

  • The dichotomy between life and death.
  • The reality of human death and the loss of senses
  • A scarcity of natural commemoration for the dead as an act of love
  • She critiques the exhibitionist Victorian mourning culture and believes energy should be put into praying instead of mourning. The poem directly addresses the lover in the first stanza with affection using a series of imperatives, instructing the lover on how to behave.
• Memento mori

  "remember you must die"
• Rossetti's father was terminally ill
• Rossetti's preoccupation with her poor health and her fear that she would die an early death
• Rossetti was 18 years old
• Admiration and fascination with death

  • Due to its mystery and religious importance
• Response to brothers poem 'The blessed damsel'

  As he believed women should grieve their husbands for years
• Queen Victoria wore black for 40 years when Albert died
• Women were expected to conform to strict expectations regarding everything from education to sexuality and marriage
• According to myth, Philomela


  • A princess of Athens who was raped by her sister's husband, King Tereus of Thrace
  • When she threatened to tell everyone about his crime, Tereus cut out her tongue
  • Later, she exacted revenge on him (there are many variations of this part of the story)
  • When he came after her in a rage, the gods turned Philomela into a nightingale
• AO2:

  • Form: BALLAD - typically used for storytelling and narrative poems. This creates a musical and lighthearted tone and rejects the severity and reality of her death, and takes away some of the receiver’s pain. 
  • Alternating lines of iambic tetrameter
  • Universal speaker - receiver is very vague- people can relate and adopt her point of view and opinions 
  • Two stanzas balanced and symmetrical to juxtapose the experience of death for those left behind and for the person who has died.
  • Rhyme Scheme: ABCBBDED ABCBDEFE - The unique E and F in each stanza speaks of remembrance
• ”When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me;”

  • Comfortable with death - straightforward. ‘I’ and ‘me’ - very personal and intimate atmosphere
  • Sibilance + juxtaposition - further sense of juxtaposition - a mask of security // monosyllabic + elongate vowels - slow pace + imperatives - severity // ‘;’ - permanence of death
• “Plant thou no roses at my head nor shady cypress tree”

  • Roses at my head - roses at gravestone / ‘head’ - contains the brain and therefore the human ‘man’ - rejection of earthly being // ‘my‘ possessive pronoun - desire for life
  • Roses alludes to Jesus’ crown of thorns. The speaker doesn’t want to be commemorated after death like Jesus. ‘roses’ - symbols of love - also vulnerable to death - alluding to the transience of human life.
• “Roses”, “cypress tree”, “green grass”, “dewdrops”

  • The lexical field of nature propounds the notion that after death, life shall carry on the same and nature shouldn’t die alongside man.
  • alliteration - moral connotations of green - wish for health and prosperity / proposition - physical separation of the two lovers.
• ”If thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget”

  • Juxtaposition reflects her internal confusion in relevance to the afterlife and what comes next. 
  • ‘Remember’ - desire for earthly love - clinging on- wants the receiver to remember what was her instead of what is her. 
  • anaphora - acceptance of death + reassurance for lover or maybe self / syntactic parallels - suggest questioning nature + unresolved feelings / ‘wilt’ natural deterioration of memories / full stop + imperatives - definite nature of death / archaism - presence of God and his will - ‘I will come to raise the living and the dead’
• “I shall not see the shadows [...] feel the rain [..]

  • Anaphora. ‘I shall not’ indicates that death is unique and fixated
  • The amalgamation of pessimistic anaphora and natural imagery creates a semantic field of humanity - cements the notion that death, while at first glance is physical, is in fact divine.
• “Haply I may remember, and haply I may forget.”

  • Endstop - symbol of transience of human life - her consciousness will continue after death and will forever be in the same position as her lover. 
• • Summary - a woman speaking to her lover about her desires after death.
• • Perspective - flipped as a response to her brother’s poem + poems like my last Duchess (Browning) / Ambiguous voice - universal speaker. 
• • Soul sleep - a state of sleep like being up until judgement day.
• Verse form - ballad + iambic tetrameter - story telling + rejection of standard form/ideals + the songs of heaven
• "nor shady cypress tree"

  • Cypress tree - biblical allusion to Isaiah 55:13 / Crucifix of Jesus was said to be made of cypress
  • known as a mourning tree for the Greeks but also symbolic of hell + sin for Victorian Christians- a hope to warn her lover of earthly desire + sin.
• "[...] hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain”

  • The nightingale (a songbird) - symbol of lament (a passionate expression of grief, sorrow, or mourning) in classical literature - ancient Greeks - Myth of Philomela - symbolic for the suffering of the world + corruption of love and lust + free from the prevalent issue of faith vs desire / 2) symbolic for the beauty of life in Victorian society - internal conflict regarding her humanity and religious obligations.
  • simile - rejection of lover’s sorrow/ songs of praise Psalm 40:3 - desperate for lover’s redemption via Christ
• ‘And dreaming through the twilight / That doth not rise nor set,’

  • alliteration + rule of three - the omnipotent presence of God in all / enjambement - the continuous nature of death / ‘twilight’ - Hebrew - time of confusion - uncertainty + religious mania
  • soul sleep (intermediate state prior to death) - lack of security - fear / juxtaposition - loss of religious resolve
• ‘Haply I may remember,’  - Archaic form - ‘by hap’ - hopeful future / anaphora - reassuring atmosphere / ‘may’ - indefinite - juxtaposition with her definite nature with God

  ‘And haply may forget.’ - full stop - permanence of death + spiritual acceptance  / binary opposites + syntactic parallels - the difference + distance between the two lovers + lack of resolution - reflection of reality + confliction  / lack of rhyme - anticlimactic nature of death + imperative - desire for lover’s freedom - despite elongated mourning periods of Victorian culture (Queen Victoria’s spanning 40 yrs)