When I am Dead, my Dearest
The speaker asks a beloved to sing no sad songs or plant roses or cypress after the speaker’s death, leaving remembrance or forgetting to the beloved’s choice. Imagining death without sight, feeling or birdsong, the speaker remains uncertain whether they too will remember or forget.
By Christina Georgina Rossetti · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Meditative Poetry · 156 words
First lines
Song.
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.
Genres
- Lyric Poetry — Two rhyming stanzas address a beloved directly, expressing the speaker’s wishes for remembrance after death.
- Meditative Poetry — The speaker imagines losing earthly sensations after death and considers whether memory will remain.
Tags
death · remembrance · forgetting · mourning · burial
What this Textopian page supports
When I am Dead, my Dearest is listed on Textopian as a poem by Christina Georgina Rossetti, dated Date unknown.
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- Work type: Poem
- Author: Christina Georgina Rossetti
- Date: Date unknown
- Language: English
- Genres: Lyric Poetry, Meditative Poetry
- Length: 156 words
- Structure: 1 section, 3 paragraphs
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