Remember by Christina Rosetti.
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
Comments by Ira Maine Esq, Poetry Editor
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of religion in 19th century England. Whitefield’s Methodism, in the late 18th century, had almost single-handedly created ‘The Great Awakening’ in the US and his partner John Wesley was pulling them in, hand over fist, at the same time in Britain. People wanted Jesus. The ‘lower orders’ wanted their own ceremony and sanctity: they wanted their own sin and absolution: most of all they wanted their own certainty. There was nothing for the working classes in the upper crust antics of the Church of England. The working class wanted to know, wanted to be assured that their lives, despite grinding hardship, were worthwhile in the sight of God. People believed. The reason for this need, for this great revival, had probably less to do with God than church historians might have us believe. Exploitation of the man in the street, in the cause of the Industrial Revolution, had reached industrial proportions. People had been driven off the land, broken and used as easily replaced cannon fodder in the factories that Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ describes as ‘dark, satanic mills’. The man from the land, in being deprived of the land, had lost his independence, his spirit and his soul. Industrially, his hard-earned rural expertise, even his very existence, meant nothing. He was, industrially speaking, simply expendable. He needed, in extremis, to believe in something, and the Church of England, a private club for the middle class, simply wasn’t available to him. Wesley stepped into the breach and provided hope, massive open air revival meetings and Methodism. Vast crowds, numbered in their thousands and made up mainly of the working class, attended these meetings. Unquestionably the C.of E. as a result of their petit-bourgeois attitude, (which included a massive contempt for the working classes) had only themselves to blame for Wesley’s success. Despite this, they have, almost to this day, not yet forgiven Wesley for his appalling presumption.
In the midst of all this there arose in England a group of artists, writers and poets who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Very briefly the Pre-Raphaelites (PRB) rejected the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy (which Reynolds had founded) in favour of the style of the early Renaissance (the Quattrocento) when painting seemed, to these young artists, to more vibrantly reflect the natural world.
Probably the best known of this company was the PRB founder, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was the son of Gabriele Rossetti, the artist, an Italian political exile and Frances Polidori, whose father, John was both doctor and friend to Lord Byron. The PRB, founded by the young Rossetti in 1848, boasted as co-founders both William Holman Hunt, who later famously painted ‘The Scapegoat’, and John Everett Millais whose painting of ‘Christ in the house of his parents’ was described as ‘blasphemous” by no less a personage than Charles Dickens.
This is the type of illustrious company that Rossetti’s sister Christina enjoyed as a young woman. She posed for her brother’s paintings, wrote articles, devotional pieces and poetry for the PRB journal The Germ and rejected at least three proposals of marriage. When Elizabeth Barrett Browning died, Christina was looked on as her natural successor. Although she never enjoyed the level of recognition accorded Browning, her place as a first rate Victorian poet is not in doubt.
As was common in those times, Christina was addicted to laudanum (opium) for most of her life. She lived well into her nineties and was admired by Tennyson, Hopkins and many others. Her work would go on to have a major influence on writers of the calibre of Virginia Woolf, Phillip Larkin and apparently even Hopkins himself.
Christina Rossetti died of breast cancer on the 29th December, 1894 and is buried in Highgate Cemetry, just a few yards away from the grave of Karl Marx.
Apart from Christina’s poem ‘Remember’, her “Goblin Market and other poems’ is where some of her best work is to be found.
The PRB, with its emphasis on the medieval, went on to considerably influence William Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement and the work of painter and stained glass artist, Edward Burne-Jones.
All of this gentle medievalism, this romantic backward glance, this attempt to reject the horrors of Industrialism, died quietly in 1914.
‘Remember’ requires little elucidation. How wonderful that somebody who is dying might offer this wholly unselfish advice to perhaps a well loved partner left behind.
I might make one or two more comments on this work, but I feel that having begun that I might not be able to finish.