Rossetti's use of Death

The two poems manage to capture Rossetti’s views on death and the after-life, both of which became an obsessive fascination during the Victorian era. However, she rejected the opinions of people where they believed in rituals which were not unusual for this time period: locks of hair cut from the dead being arranged and worn in lockets, or elaborate hearses at funerals, replete with black horses, ostrich feathers and flowers. Instead it was her religious beliefs that influenced her opinions, which can be seen in both poems, especially in Remember, where she seems to be unafraid of death because she believes there is an after-life where she will visit those she once knew.

'Song' is about life after death, focusing especially on how people should not stop living their lives just because a loved one has stop living their own. The death of a loved one usually means that the living friends and family’s worlds temporarily stop spinning due to the loss, but in this poem the speaker explicitly says that the dead cannot feel the bad, therefore we should not feel so much sorrow. In the poem, Rossetti uses imperatives and commanding phrases to plead with the person she is addressing. She begs for no clichés or stereotypically feminine respects to be given to her when she dies, as stated in the line, “Plant thou no roses at my head.” She also wishes for no “Sad songs” to be sung for her (implying the hymns at a classic church funeral) because she would much prefer for the grieving to be happy, never minding whether they have forgotten or remembered her. Insisting the person to “be the green grass above” infers that she wishes for them to be the closest thing to her, as well as a forever growing piece of nature. Pleading for them to be the green grass shows she wants them to be ordinary, nothing elaborate, just the same as before she died. Therefore, she does not want her death to affect the people she is leaving behind. As an alternative of viewing death as the end, to her it is thought of as the next adventure, which can be seen where she describes death as “gone away.”Similarly in the poem ‘Remember,’ Rossetti wishes the person she is leaving behind to be happy rather than to be depressed over her death. This is clearly shown in the line, “better by far you should forget smile.” 

An example that perfectly reflects the iambic trimeter in 'Song' is the line, “I shall not feel the rain;” which gives the impact on the most important words.  This line means that when someone is dead, the rain, or effectively any bad prospects of being alive on Earth, cannot impact the dead, so there is no reason for the living to pity the dead in any sense. However, a line that doesn’t fit the pattern is, “I shall not hear the nightingale.