"Plant thou no roses at my head"
- About remembrance, death, mourning
- Attitudes to process of mourning - resignation, acceptance, forbearance
- Not accepting, not trying to change but being patient/ tolerant
- Accepts way things are but still sees it needs changing
- Working against convention
- Metrical variation - stress falls on imperative - adds confidence / inner strength / quiet strong voice
- Tetrameter
- Euphemism for death - softens it - making it easier to accept
- Addresses sense of disappointment with how the world is
- Strength of narrator as deals with disappointment
- Acceptance with recognition that not right
Still the seasons come and go:"
- Tetrameter - reinforces strength and forbearance
- Repetition - disappointment and recognition that things are going to continue in the same way without her - acceptance of her own lack of importance
- "Wag on" - colloquial - softens whilst also presenting issues - drawing attention to it
- Insignificance of the individual
- Sense of selflessness - looking beyond ego
"Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad"
- Metrical variation - iambic pentameter to interrupted, complex, unconventional
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:"
- Feminist angle - pronoun use, repetition
- Highlighting constraints
- Emphasises disaffection with gender relationships and patriarchal control
- Complex attitudes towards it
- Return of a dead lover
- Iambic pentameter
- Sense of progression of thoughts
- Realises that the sweetness is overwhelming and tinged with sadness
- Nostalgia - sadness associated
- Repetition, listing
- Tetrameter - reinforces the breathing and the life it has
- A living dream - a living memory
- A poem of loss - feeling when unable to return to a lost state
- Garden is an analogy/symbol for a state of mind
- Ambiguous
And dear they are, but not so dear."
- Nostalgia - the past was wonderful when looking back
- Parallelism highlights it
- Tetrameter
- Sense of longing and acceptance
- Longing to change but recognises it's impossible
- Melancholy - sense of quiet, enduring sadness
Mortar and stone to build a wall;"
- Personification - symbolic
- Symbolises restrictions that Victorian women faced
- Narrative poem
- Third person narrator
- Lots of dialogue
- Resignation, strength, bravery
- Not panicked or emotional - attitude of stoicism - stoic
- Facing set-backs with calm and inner strength
- Rossetti praising them - moral lesson to us
- Seems to look to husband for reassurance
- Parallelism - support/together in speech - supporting each other
- Selfless
"My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit"
- Simile - joy, celebration
- Emphasis on ripeness - readiness, opportunity - this is my moment
- Influence of Romantic poets - using natural imagery to illustrate human emotions
- Narrative poem
- First person but an observer
- Lots of dialogue
You wore about your neck,
That day we waded ankle-deep
For lilies in the beck:"
- Maude Clare - adventurous, unconventional
- Shouldn't be together without a chaperone
- Accepting and seeking sensuous experience
- Symbolic of their adventurous seeking of sensuous pleasures
- He is above her and male
- Against sense of constraint - says in front of whole congregation
- Strong
- Question and answer, question and answer
- Interrogative
- Analogy - Journey = life - common analogy
- Life as something to be endured
- Doesn't hide from the truth but offers hope and reassurance
- Rossetti found stoicism in belief - found ability to continue in a difficult life through religion
- Religion not trying to hide - it is a struggle
"Let us strike hands as hearty friends;"
- First person narrator
- Strong - trying to teach a man endurance and strength in the face of disappointment
- Seen through imperative
- Unconventional
