Poet
Christina Rossetti
English poet · 1830–1894
RememberWhen I am dead, my dearestGoblin Market
Christina Rossetti wrote some of the most quietly devastating poems in English about love, loss, and letting go. Sister of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, she moved in Pre-Raphaelite circles but lived a reserved, devout life.
Her two short poems about being remembered after death — "Remember" and "When I am dead, my dearest" — are among the most chosen funeral readings in the English-speaking world, beloved for their gentleness: grief, she insists, should never become a burden the living carry forever.
17 poems by Christina Rossetti
Full text, free to read — all in the public domain.
Remember
Christina Rossetti · 1862
Remember me when I am gone away,Gone far away into the silent land;When you can no more hold me by the hand,
14 lines · sonnet
A Birthday
Christina Rossetti · 1861
My heart is like a singing birdWhose nest is in a water'd shoot;My heart is like an apple-tree
16 lines · lyric
- RememberRemember me when I am gone away,…14 lines
- When I Am Dead, My Dearest (Song)When I am dead, my dearest,…16 lines
- A Better RessurectionI have no wit, no words, no tears;…24 lines
- A BirthdayMy heart is like a singing bird…16 lines
- At HomeWhen I was dead, my spirit turned…32 lines
- Before The Paling Of The StarsBefore the winter morn,…23 lines
- From “Later Life”VI…30 lines
- From Sunset to Star RiseGo from me, summer friends, and tarry not:…14 lines
- Is it Well with the Child?SAFE where I cannot die yet,…10 lines
- Later lifeSomething this foggy day, a something which…14 lines
- No, Thank You JohnI never said I loved you, John:…31 lines
- Spring QuietGone were but the Winter,…25 lines
- The Thread of LifeI…45 lines
- Winter: My SecretI tell my secret? No indeed, not I:…34 lines
- EchoCome to me in the silence of the night;…18 lines
- In the Bleak Midwinter1. In the bleak mid-winter…40 lines
- Up-HillDoes the road wind up-hill all the way?…16 lines