"Remembrance" is a poem written by British author Emily Brontë that deals with memory and grief. It was published in 1846. Brontë is best known for her work as a fiction writer, particularly for her seminal novel, Wuthering Heights, which is commonly regarded as one of the definitive texts in Gothic literature. Brontë grew up in a small village near the town of Bradford. Her sisters Charlotte and Anne would also go on to be significant authors in their own right. In 1846, under pseudonyms, the three sisters published a collected volume of their poetry, which was reviewed favorably in The Athenaeum. "Remembrance" was featured in that collection. While largely known for her fiction, Brontë was a prolific poet, consistently writing verse from her early twenties and onward. Her poems often show a preoccupation with love, death, and the passage of time. This particular work aligns with those themes, as the speaker reflects on the loss of her beloved.
The poem is written in four quatrains with ABAB rhyme scheme. It is an elegy for a lost loved one in which the speaker is looking for a way to move on. It revolves around an unnamed speaker, who is visiting her dead lover's grave. She is overwhelmed with her shifting emotions and cannot seem to wrap her head around how to move on. Brontë comments on how time causes a slow fade of her memories of her lover. Various themes are noted in this poem, such as loss, mourning, and memory. Loss is presented through the physical loss of a loved one, which results in the speaker’s despair for the majority of the poem. However, at the poem's conclusion, the speaker refuses to let the death of a loved one stop her from living out the rest of her life. Ultimately, the message conveyed by the poem is that memory, while sometimes comforting, can prevent an individual from living in their present moment.
