When I am Dead, My Dearest ThemeĬhristina Rossetti’s poem ‘When I am Dead, My Dearest’ thematically revolves around death and its resulting activities. She is not sure whether she will ever share her feelings with her dearest ones after her passing. Moreover, she does not know whether she will ever remember her addressee or forget forever, because she is not dead yet and she cannot tell the truth after her death. Like the twilight is the time when the Sun is neither fully rising neither fully set, death also does not qualify her for extreme pain or extreme joy. By ‘twilight’, the speaker is most possibly referring to her belongingness. ‘And dreaming through the twilight/ That doth not rise nor set’, she may either remember or forget her dearest.
Once she is dead, she tells her dearest, that she will no longer hear about the worldly sufferings implicated by the nightingale’s song of pain. Similar to the Lord Buddha’s preaching of pain’s inevitability, there is pain even in the world of the speaker or we might also say Rossetti’s life. The speaker claims, she will also lose the sense of hearing after death by saying ‘I shall not hear the nightingale/ Sing on, as if in pain’. Likewise, ‘the rain’ connotes the tears the poet shed when she was ill. In that respect, ‘the shadows’ connotatively means the darkness that she had to go through while alive. She is, now, consoling them by arguing that her death is her freedom from all those diseases. and she had had enough of her dearest’s love. While alive, she suffered from diseases like depression, graves’ disease, breast cancer, etc. Now, she is explaining the worthlessness of planting a cypress tree above her.
‘I shall not see the shadows,’/ I shall not feel the rain’, she mentions. In the second stanza of ‘When I am dead, My Dearest’, the poet is talking about what she will experience while in the grave. In contrast, she can never control her dearest’s emotions and feelings at her death. It is because she knows that she can convince them not to plant trees and rose above her grave. The poet is leaving her dearest with a choice of either to remember or to forget her. Hence, she ends up with an intellectual request, ‘And if thou wilt, remember,/ And if thou wilt, forget’. It might also connote that she wants to mingle with Nature after she is done living.įinally, she does not know whether she wants to be remembered or forgotten. She just wants a proper burial and be left alone that way because there will be grass over time above her. The term ‘be’ does not obviously mean that she is requesting them to be the green grass, she would rather love to see green grass that bears showers and dewdrops above her grave.ĭo you wonder why she is asking for grass? The grass, in fact, grows naturally, and hence, she does not want any decorations on her grave. In their place, she rather wants them to ‘Be the green grass above me/ With showers and dewdrops wet’. She neither needs roses nor a shady cypress tree to protect her from the Sun and rain. By ‘head’, the speaker means her grave where she asks her dearest not to waste time planting roses or cypress. She further says ‘Plant thou no roses at my head,/ Nor shady cypress tree’. To be precise, she does not want an emotional farewell from her family and other loved ones, and above that, she also wishes not to ruin the moments of others’ lives by letting them mourn her death.
She does not want her dearest to sing sad songs for her because she thinks it only makes them weak. Instead, she might be referring to everyone who loved her. Since Rossetti was not married throughout her lifetime, we cannot expect her ‘dearest’ to be her beau. When the speaker says ‘When I am dead, my dearest,/Sing no sad songs for me,” she is imagining her impending death. the entire poem does not have a well-organized rhyming pattern which symbolizes the poet’s unstable mentality before her death. In Christina Rossetti’s poem “When I am Dead, My Dearest,” the first stanza is about the world of the living while the second stanza is the poet’s imagination of her experience in the grave.
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