Today’s Poem: When I Am Dead, My Dearest

Christina Rossetti’s exercise in self-mastery

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, 1877 (Wikimedia Commons)

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When I Am Dead, My Dearest

by Christina Rossetti

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.

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As we’ve noted here before, Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) taught herself, in the course of her life, an iron-corseted emotional restraint that isn’t the first thing we associate with her poetry. It’s difficult to reconcile the tenor of such poems as “A Birthday” with some photographs of her, in which she appears as a stodgy, turtlish, utterly conventional Victorian lady, the last person in the world — so you’d suppose — to give way to excesses of ardor. 

Of course, as we age, it is hard to reconcile our outward appearance with the nineteen-year-old still very much alive in our inner self, however many carapaces of experience, if not of actual maturity or wisdom, that self has accrued over time. Rossetti’s brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), who used her frequently as his artist’s model, was more successful than most photographers in capturing, in the face of his middle-aged sister, something of the girl who still inhabited the form of the restrained spinster. 

Christina Rossetti died at the end of the 19th century, in the waning shadows of the Victorian era and the retreating waterline of Romanticism. Just as the ardent girl gave way to the paragon of self-control, with the rise of Modernism’s cool, skeptical, appraising poetic eye, the emotional intensity of Rossetti’s verse, even the Gothic strangeness of “Goblin Market,” fell out of favor. By mid-century, the novelist Barbara Pym, in her 1952 novel Excellent Women, could appropriate Christina Rossetti, comically but not without pathos, as the emblematic poet for the awkward, innocent, middle-aged spinster Winifred Malory. 

By her bedside Winifred keeps, as the novel’s more hard-bitten narrator notes, a “limp” leatherbound edition of the poems of Christina Rossetti. The narrator imagines her reading and weeping over “When I Am Dead, My Dearest,” when “there had, perhaps, never been a ‘dearest.’” This no-nonsense narrator, Mildred — herself a thirty-something spinster — pities Winifred, but recognizes, too, that what Winifred fears is a danger for herself as well. To be unloved is to be unremembered. And to be unremembered is to be unloved. The dead may not be conscious of that eternal loneliness. The living may be all too conscious. 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, 1866 (Wikimedia Commons)

Composed in simple trimeter abcb quatrains, “When I Am Dead, My Dearest” is an early Rossetti poem. She wrote those stanzas in 1848, at the age of eighteen. She was, then, still young, still beautiful, still able to contemplate the possibility of having a “dearest” and of being someone’s “dearest.” Yet in this poem, her mind’s forward impulse moves not to the wish-fulfillment of romantic love, but to the overshadowing reality of death. 

It might strike us as strange, even morbid, for a young girl to imagine herself dead. But maybe the problem here is our own perceived distance from death, our squeamish reluctance to contemplate our erasure from the memory of the living. Meanwhile, what elevates this poem — what makes it actually not limp, like the covers of that book at Winifred Malory’s chaste bedside — is the way its young speaker steels herself, with an intimation of her developing self-mastery, to let go of love, and to be let go of: to endure, unfeeling, the long, anonymous loneliness of the grave. 

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