Compare attitudes to love as presented in Christina Rossetti's 'Remember' and Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 116'

It’s in their exploration of time’s relationship to love that the two poems differ most starkly. Rossetti acknowledges that time may ultimately trounce her lover's memory of her. Her use of repetition in ‘day by day’ evokes the comforting and delicate routine of their relationship, cruelly disrupted by her death. Shakespeare uses similar repetition (‘remover to remove’) for example. Yet, rather than create this sense of fragile routine, this bolsters and empowers the poem’s theme of couples and pairs. Rossetti’s speaker, after death, will pass into a ‘silent land’ where (one presumes) she cannot be heard or reached. Rosetti’s use of the word ‘darkness’ creates a powerful sense of the memory of her fading away after death, becoming increasingly shrouded and uncertain. The term ‘corruption’, meanwhile, evokes both her decaying corpse and the gradual decay of the memory of her. Though she repeats the word ‘remember’ throughout the poem, this evolves from a kind of gentle imperative (‘remember me’) to an eventual admission of the possibility of failure (‘better by far you should forget...than to remember’). Rossetti’s attitude to love accommodates the possibility of forgetting, yet also contemplates the benefit of this for her lover.

Shakespeare, by contrast is more insistent that love can and should withstand the test of time. Although he powerfully personifies time and imagines superficial, fleshy attraction (‘rosy lips and cheeks’) fading away under his sharp ‘sickle’, the idea of love fading after death is rebutted: love lasts ‘to the edge of doom’. His use of nautical imagery adds to this effect. He compares love to the north star (a reference point for lost sailors) and conceives of love guiding the ‘wandring’ sailor (individual) through the turbulent sea (of life). Line 6 also juxtaposes the ferocious ‘tempest’ (another disruptive nautical force) with the stability of love, ‘never shaken’ who ‘looks’ on passively. The term ‘wand’ring’, meanwhile, creates a powerful sense of listlessness and meandering, set right by love’s steadying influence. Rossetti’s delicate and cautious tone is absent from Shakespeare’s more emphatic poem, full of rhetorical flourishes (‘Oh no!’). Though both use the sonnet form, Shakespeare uses the sestet to bolster his vision of a permanent, unflappable force. Rossetti, contrastingly brings a sense of doubt into these final lines, interrogating her initial view of the value of memory. Thus, Shakespeare and Rossetti present differing attitudes to love. Where Shakespeare speaks confidently about love’s permanence, Rosetti dwells on (and ultimately comes to accept) its possible transience.