2 quotations linked to Remember by or associated with Christina Rossetti, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Grief, memory, separation, love and the tension between wanting remembrance and permitting compassionate forgetting.
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“Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land.”
The opening request names anticipated separation directly, making remembrance part of how love is imagined continuing after the speaker is gone.
Source note: “Remember,” first published in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862); Project Gutenberg #16950. The sonnet later softens this request by allowing compassionate forgetting rather than demanding perpetual grief.
“Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.”
Love is expressed through releasing the other person from an obligation to grieve, placing their future well-being above continued remembrance.
Source note: Closing thought of Remember; Rossetti shifts from asking to be remembered toward permitting compassionate forgetting.