In "Song," Rossetti believes death to be a liberating experience. Mourning over it is not necessary because it would increase misery.
As the poem's speaker, Rossetti is quite open that when she does die, the "dearest" left behind should "sing no sad songs" over her passing. She gives instruction to "plant... no roses at my head." Rossetti feels that there is an inevitability to death. Mourning over it is not necessary: "Haply I may remember, / And haply may forget." Death is a natural condition of being in the world. At the same time, Rossetti sees death as a freeing experience. When she writes that she will no longer "feel the rain" or hear the nightingale / Sing on, as if in pain," it is an indication that death will free her from the pain and hurt that is a part of the living world. Rossetti would argue that to mourn over it causes unnecessary pain when it should be seen as something liberating.
In the concluding line to another one of Rossetti's poems, "Remember," she writes that we should not "remember and be sad." "Song" conveys a similar attitude towards mourning. For Rossetti, mourning brings extended and inappropriate sadness to an experience that transcends attachment.
Sunday, April 29, 2018
In Rossetti's "Song," how does mourning over death increase misery?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment