Analysis of Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest’

Christina Rossetti (1830-94) was one of the leading female poets of the
Victorian era. Her ‘Song’, beginning ‘When I am dead, my dearest’, remains
one of her best-loved poems. ‘Song’ was written in 1848 when Christina
Rossetti was still a teenager, but not published until 1862 when it appeared in
her first volume of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems. The poem is a
variation on the theme of John Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’,
and provides a neat complement to another of Christina Rossetti’s early
poems, the sonnet ‘Remember’, which she wrote a year after ‘When I am dead,
my dearest’.

When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

A brief summary of Rossetti’s ‘Song’, then. In the first stanza the speaker asks
her beloved that when she dies, he doesn’t sing any sad songs for her, or put
flowers or plant a tree on her grave. The grass on her grave, showered by rain
and morning dew, will be enough – and if he does remember her, that’s fine,
but if he forgets her, so be it.

In the second stanza, the speaker explains why she isn’t fussed about what her
beloved does to remember her after she has died: she will not be there to see
the shadows or feel the rain, or hear the nightingale singing; after death, she
will be ‘dreaming’, and sleeping, through a perpetual ‘twilight’, and she may
remember him, but she may not.

Critical Analysis
This simple two stanza poem is actually quite a powerful evocation of the
state of death and the kind of peace and tranquility that it gives those that
die.This poem seems like a very simple little song upon first reading, but some
of the implications it subtly raises are not so straightforward once we embark
upon a closer analysis of ‘When I am dead, my dearest’. Take that ending, for
instance: Christina Rossetti implies, through stating that she may not
remember her beloved after she has died, that there may be no afterlife, and
that she may not be capable of remembering him. ‘Haply’, the word Rossetti
uses twice at the end of the poem, is not quite the same as ‘happily’: it means
‘by chance’ or, if you will, ‘perhaps’. Rossetti seems to be unsure. She rejects
the glib message of Christianity which reassures us that there will be an
afterlife to go to, and that when we die we will be able to ‘look down on’ those
we love and ‘watch over’ them (assuming we go to heaven rather than the
other day); but Rossetti seems less sure of this. Indeed, the poem’s very
message – asking that her beloved not seek to remember her in all of the usual
conventional ways a lover was expected to: placing flowers on the grave,
singing sad songs. Even the tears of mourning are absent from Rossetti’s
poem: instead, nature will provide the ‘tears’ on her grave, in the form of the
‘showers and dewdrops wet’, but these are forces of nature and so don’t weep
in mourning for her – they would be there anyway.

Similarly, the request that her beloved ‘Sing no sad songs for me’ is echoed in
the second stanza by the reference to the ‘nightingale / Sing[ing] on, as if in
pain’. The nightingale, in a story from Greek myth which Christina Rossetti
knew well, is linked to the tragic story of Philomela, a woman who was raped
by her brother-in-law and turned into a nightingale when the gods took pity
on her – this is supposedly why the bird sings ‘as if in pain’. But this is a story,
nothing more: Rossetti knows that the nightingale sings the way it does
because we, as humans, hear its song as sorrowful and full of tragedy – we
impute this human feeling (a version of the pathetic fallacy) onto the bird’s
song.

‘When I am dead, my dearest’ is a remarkably accomplished song for Christina

Rossetti to have written while still in her teens. It also repays closer analysis
because of its departure from the sort of funereal dirges and songs of
remembrance we associate with Victorian poetry. Rossetti’s ‘Song’, unlike the
nightingale’s in the Greek story, is unusually stoic and free from tragic self-
pity or sorrow. We see in this poem the quality that Philip Larkin so admired
in Christina Rossetti: her ‘steely stoicism’.