Gone far away into the silent land;
             When you can no more hold me by the hand,
             Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
             You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
             It will be late to counsel then or pray.
             Yet if you should forget me for a while
             And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
             For if the darkness and corruption leave
             A vestige of thoughts that I once had,
             Better by far you should forget and smile
             Than that you should remember and be sad.
             I chose to write my poetry criticism on the sonnet "Remember" by Christina Rossetti. It was written in 1849 when Rossetti was just 19 years old. She is considered to be one of the foremost women poets of the 19th century Victorian period. In this sonnet the themes of love, death, and reaction to death are introduced.
             Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830. She was the product of a wealthy family and was raised a pious Calvinist. She wrote about many themes ranging from love to the seasons of the year. She used little visual detail in her poetry. She let her ideas speak for themselves. She is sometimes incorrectly associated with the women's suffrage movement but she was happy with her place in life and furthermore said that Christianity and womens' rights were at odds. She spent the last 15 years of her life in seclusion and died in 1894 a well-known poet.
             This sonnet, "Remember", is written to a lover and is about their love, her death, and how she wants him to react to her death. The themes are alluded to throughout the poem. Lines 1-3 deal with the element of death. Lines 5 and 6 hint that Rossetti and her lover were to be married, showing their love for each other, and lines 9-14 are Rossetti's instructions that her lover move on with his life and not dwell
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