Both a birthday and remember are written by Christina Rossetti. This particular poet usually writes about death or religion in her poetry, sometimes both. In Remember the theme of love is shown by her wanting her partner to remember her and wanting him to think about the times he was describing his and her future together. However, this all changes in the second half of this poem. She realises that she loves him and therefore doesn’t want him to be unhappy so she takes back everything she had said and tells him to forget her and be happy rather than to remember her and be sad.
Remember also has a trace of religion in it. We understand this when she says ‘it would be too late to counsel then or pray’. This also applies to A Birthday where she uses the word ‘dais’ which means God or a higher platform. Some poetic techniques are used throughout Remember. These include a rhyme scheme of ABBA, imagery of a quiet peacful land as well as another of darkness, corruption and fear, a main theme which is explaining and persuading to the reader that this is the way he/she should deal with his/her own emotions when it comes to loosing somebody you love.
The writer might have wanted to express this through poetry because she was not listened to much being a woman and living in the times she did. She is trying to get the reader to empathise with the way she is thinking and feeling through the situaution she is in, in this poem. Reader responce is quite important in this poem. The reader responce could depend on how emotional or how ‘warm hearted’ the reader is. Readers usually become sad upon reading this poem. Remember is a sad poem with a melancholy tone which describes the pain of love. However, in A Birthday, this is not quite the case.
This poem is happy, pleasant and celebrative from the first line. This poem is also split into two stanzas and repetition is used to emphasis the fact that her heart is so happy and trumphant that her love has come to her. Throughout the poem there is different imagery. This includes beauty which links to the nature she is describing, flamboyant birds which are the ‘peacocks with a hundred eyes’ and there is also a feeling of idealistic images of love throughout the lines. The writer uses many exotic words to describe the beauty and precious value of the love she is feeling.
These words include such phrases as fleur-de-lys, dais and vair. The usage of these words also shows that the author may have been of a higher status in society at the time she was alive. This poem seems almost too idealistic when it comes to generalising the way she describes her love. It seems very clich? as if its from a story book – a fairy tail that ends in ‘and they lived happily ever after’. This poem is divided into two sections using a full stop so the poem is basically two sentences. Both sections are two octets which have been put together to create the poem.
The first section of the poem focuses on nature. There is a lot of personification used to compare the writer’s heart to beautiful natural and luxurious things in nature as well as some hard to get hold of in those days, man made material things, for example doves and pomegranates. The second section is all about her love and how she has either found it or it has returned to her. The words used throughout the second section are very carefully selected. You can tell this because each different word seems to symbolise a different aspect of the way she is feeling.
For example she uses the phrase ‘Because the birthday of my life’ extremely carefully and cleverly. She is basically saying that since the way she has used ‘birthday’ symbolises re-birth, new things, spring and re-growth, she should use it in the phrase the way she has to indicate that her love has somehow re-grown or has been ‘born’ to her and it is something that now belongs to her and she owns it forever. Another interpretation of this could be that she is dedicated to him now that she has him and will do whatever is requiered to stay with him throughout eternity. The poem is very smooth sailing and quite understandable.
The writer doesn’t use complicated words but she uses them in an extremely clever thought out way to make the poem sound like it has a certain twist in it. This makes the reader think about what the poem means and instead of empathysing with her she would prefer the reader to sympathyse with her and feel happy and warm whilst reading the poem. Unlike many of her other poems, A Birthday is not about death but is infact about birth. A Birthday is a happy and passionate poem full of luxurious objects of interest to many which describes the successful feeling of true love.
