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Remember

Christina Rossetti's sonnet: better to forget and smile than to remember and be sad.

For funerals

At a glance

Length, read slowly
About a minute
Where it goes
  • Reading · Celebration of lifeRead by: family or friends

Remember me when I am gone away, 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. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you planned: Only remember me; you understand 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 the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.

Christina Rossetti

Use in your program

What the poem says

A dying woman speaks to the person she loves. Remember me when I am gone, she says, when you can no longer hold my hand. Then, at line nine, the sonnet turns. If you forget me for a while and remember later, do not grieve. She would rather be forgotten and see a smile than be remembered with sadness. The poem gives permission to heal.

When it fits

Families choose it for a husband, wife or parent who said, in so many words, that life must go on. It names no church and no heaven, apart from one mention of prayer, so it reads well at a celebration of life and in a church service. If the family wants faith spoken aloud, Crossing the Bar says it through the image of the sea. For a lighter tone, Death Is Nothing at All asks the family to laugh.

Reading it aloud

A son, daughter or grandchild reads it, often in a funeral service after the eulogy or at the close of a celebration of life. Fourteen lines take under a minute. One tip: pause before "Yet if you should forget me for a while." That is where the tone changes. Print the poem in the funeral program next to a photo, where it reads as a last message.

About the poet and the text

Christina Rossetti wrote this sonnet in 1849, at nineteen. It was printed thirteen years later in Goblin Market and Other Poems, which Macmillan brought out in Cambridge and London in 1862. We copied the text from page 58 of that first edition, through the Wikisource transcription, and checked it against the scan.

Goes well with