In the following essay excerpt, Conley compares and contrasts "Remember" with "After Death," a poem Rossetti wrote around the same time.
In the sonnet "Remember" (1849) the speaker addresses a lover concerning her imminent death, with the repeated imperative to "remember me." Unlike "Song" ("When I am dead, my dearest") (1848), in which the speaker withdraws from the beloved into the indifference of death, "Remember" presents a speaker who at least appears to engage with the beloved and offer remembrance as the possibility of continuity between life and death. However, while adopting a different strategy to that of "Song," in which death renders null and void the terms "remember" and "forget" through an equivocating diction of indifference—"Haply I may remember, / And haply may forget"—"Remember" privileges first one term and then the other, until.....
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