Summary
The speaker stands at the snow-covered grave of her beloved. She experiences an unbearable grief in his absence. She notes that fifteen years have passed since his death and that her memory of him is fading. She feels guilt for moving on and forgetting.
Analysis
In "Remembrance," Brontë asks how someone moves on from the death of a lover. The speaker of the poem feels the slow fade of her memories of her beloved and experiences guilt about this. She wonders if she can find a way forward in her life without betraying her memory of a person so close to her heart. These concerns are amplified as a significant amount of time has passed and she has begun to feel some relief from her pain. She questions if this is the right way to feel about this loss and how she should properly mourn this man she loved.
The poem opens with some scene-setting. The speaker says: "Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee, / Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!" The image of the snow places the poem during wintertime, while also suggesting that the speaker's lover has been dead for some time. She underscores the emotional impact of this moment by noting that he is "far, far removed," meaning that he is entirely separated from her in his "dreary grave." The next two lines ("Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, / Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave?") provide the poem with its central question: how should the speaker continue her life in the wake of this loss? She asks herself if she has forgotten her "only Love" after he has been torn from her by "Time's all-severing wave." This phrase is about the loss itself as well as the way in which time has made her memory of him fainter. She is afraid that she has begun to move past his memory. In the next stanza, she describes this fading of the past in further detail: "Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover / Over the mountains, on that northern shore, / Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover / Thy noble heart forever, ever more?" She finds that in solitary moments her "thoughts no longer hover over" the place where her lover is buried. In this extended nature description, she is depicting how she dwells on the memory of her lover less and less as time goes by.
In the next stanza, she clarifies how much time has passed since her lover's death ("Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers,") and describes the changing of the seasons ("From those brown hills, have melted into spring"). It has been fifteen years. This gives additional weight to the speaker's concerns about how long she should grieve him. His death was not recent; she has been carrying this pain for a long period of time and is only now feeling slight relief. Finally, she shows her own devotion to keeping his memory alive ("Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers / After such years of change and suffering!"). She takes a certain amount of pride in how "faithful" she has been, but notes how these "years of change and suffering" have worn on her. She is highlighting the sacrifices she has made to be devoted to his memory. She wants to know how long she should continue to live a diminished life. In the fourth stanza, she asks for his forgiveness: "Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee." She feels guilty for healing but cannot deny that some of the pain has lessened as she has let go. She states that time is pushing her forward ("While the world's tide is bearing me along;") and she feels as if she is rejoining the world. The phrase "the world's tide" deepens the portrait of the speaker's passivity in this process. She is not trying to move away from the past, but is being carried along by the passage of time. She then describes more recent feelings that have taken hold of her: "Other desires and other hopes beset me, / Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!" She is offering a picture of the feelings ("desires" and "hopes") that have begun to reappear in her life, but is quick to note that these feelings do not do her beloved "wrong." Instead, they merely "obscure" him, as they are occurring at a time after his death.
The poem is written in eight quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme. Each stanza is a self-contained statement, seeming to represent the speaker wrestling with her inner turmoil of doubts and pain. The progression of the stanzas shows the speaker going back and forth between feeling the pain of his absence and finding some solace and hope in a future for herself. The poem, to a large extent, feels like the speaker debating with herself about how to proceed with her life.
