Context and its influence

The sonnet form leads a reader to expect a 'turn' — a volta — usually around line 9, where the poem's argument or mood pivots. This single contextual expectation illuminates exactly what is happening in Rossetti's 'Remember'. The opening lines are an insistent plea: 'Remember me when I am gone away, / Gone far away into the silent land'. The imperative 'Remember me' and the image of irreversible distance set up a poem that seems wholly devoted to demanding remembrance. But at line 9 the single word 'Yet' — 'Yet if you should forget me for a while' — performs precisely the turn the form has primed the reader to anticipate. Because a reader of a sonnet half-expects a reversal at this point, 'Yet' lands with structural weight: it is not a casual qualification but the hinge on which the whole poem swings, from a plea to be remembered toward permission to be forgotten. The contextual fact (the sonnet's conventional volta) is not idle background — it changes how we read that one word, making 'Yet' feel structurally inevitable and emotionally decisive at once. Without the convention, 'Yet' is just a conjunction; with it, it is the moment the poem changes its love.

Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience are subtitled 'Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul', and this structural context illuminates a feature that might otherwise seem merely childlike: the gentle, repetitive simplicity of 'The Lamb'. The poem's voice is catechistic and tender — 'Little Lamb, who made thee? / Dost thou know who made thee?' — and its answer is just as simple: 'Little Lamb, I'll tell thee, / Little Lamb, I'll tell thee!'. Read in isolation, this softness could look naive, a nursery rhyme with little to analyse. But understood through Blake's principle of contrary states, the simplicity is newly legible as a deliberate poetic choice — one half of a designed pairing whose other half (the terror of 'The Tyger', in the state of Experience) it exists to balance. The context changes how the repetition reads: the soothing iteration of 'Little Lamb' is not a failure to be complex but a chosen counterweight, the sound of Innocence made audible precisely so that Experience can sound against it. The contextual point does real work — it converts apparent naivety into structural meaning, so the gentleness becomes a position the whole collection depends on rather than a limitation of the single poem.

Approached first on its own terms, the most striking feature of these lines is the relentless anaphora of 'every': 'In every cry of every Man, / In every Infant's cry of fear, / In every voice, in every ban'. The grammatical insistence saturates the stanza so completely that no inhabitant of the city is left outside its reach — the repetition makes the suffering feel total and inescapable before the speaker has named its cause. So far this is method-to-effect, AO2. The context of production deepens it. Read as a poem of PROTEST — written to indict the suffering of a controlled and growing city — the anaphora ceases to be musical decoration and becomes the formal proof of the speaker's accusation: the poem does not merely describe widespread misery, its very grammar enacts the claim that the misery is universal, that no one is exempt. The metaphor that closes the stanza then completes the move: the 'mind-forg'd manacles' the speaker hears in 'every' voice are legible, through the protest frame, as an accusation that the city's control has been internalised — the chains are forged in the mind, self-inflicted as well as imposed. The contextual point illuminates rather than pads precisely because it changes how the repetition and the metaphor READ: against the protest context, form and image stop being description and become indictment. The form has argued the case before the final image arrives.

The decisive movement of the poem is its reversal in the sestet, and the sonnet's conventional turn is what makes that reversal feel earned rather than arbitrary. The octave has insisted on remembrance, and even its closing lines retain a faint imperiousness — 'Only remember me; you understand / It will be late to counsel then or pray' — where the qualifying 'Only' and the warning of finality keep the speaker in command. Then the volta arrives at line 9 with a single conjunction: 'Yet if you should forget me for a while / And afterwards remember, do not grieve'. Because the sonnet form leads a reader to expect a turn at exactly this point, 'Yet' carries structural force; the convention has primed us for the reversal, so the move from demanding to releasing reads as the form's own logic working itself out, not as a change of mind the poem stumbles into. The diction of the final quatrain then completes the release. The harsh, physical 'darkness and corruption' is named only to be subordinated — the speaker imagines the persistence of 'the thoughts that once I had' not as a comfort to themselves but as a possible burden on the survivor — and the closing couplet pivots on plain monosyllables: 'Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad'. The simplicity of 'smile' and 'sad' matches the simplicity of the decision the speaker is offering: a decision against their own remembrance, made for another's happiness. Read within a devotional tradition whose poems characteristically move toward consolation and acceptance, this turn is legible as more than a personal gesture — it inhabits a recognised movement and deepens it, so that the consolation arrives with the authority of a form built to reach exactly this resolution. What the poem finally achieves, then, is the conversion of an imperative ('remember') into a release ('forget and smile'), enacted through the sonnet's turn; reading it, one feels the consolation land before one has finished assenting to it — which is the surest sign that the form has done the persuading before the argument is complete.

The love-sonnet convention a reader brings to this poem — the Petrarchan expectation that a beloved will be idealised through flattering comparison, eyes like the sun, lips like coral, cheeks like roses, breasts like snow — is precisely what makes Sonnet 130's relentless negations legible as something other than insult. Taken in isolation, the opening run could read as cruelty: 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips' red; / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head'. Read against the convention, however, each line withholds a cliche the reader has been trained to expect, so the poem accumulates not insults but ABSENCES — every flattering simile the tradition would supply is named only to be denied. Because the convention has primed us for idealisation, the denials read as a deliberate, almost combative refusal of poetic flattery rather than as fault-finding; the speaker is dismantling, line by line, the false currency of conventional praise. This is what licenses the couplet's pivot: 'And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare'. The word 'belied' retrospectively names what the whole poem has been doing — exposing the lie inside conventional comparison — and 'false compare' makes the genre itself the target. One might object that the catalogue of negations risks sounding ungallant whatever its purpose, and a reader determined to hear coldness could; but the couplet forecloses that reading by converting the negations into the very ground of the love's sincerity — a love that needs no flattering comparison to be real. Without the love-sonnet convention as context, the negations look like an insult; with it, they become an argument. The context does not decorate the reading — it unlocks it.

The most charged feature of the scene is not anything the servant SAYS but the asymmetry of how the two characters are permitted to speak — and the social context of a rigid household hierarchy is what makes that asymmetry legible as drama rather than as mere politeness. On the page, the employer's lines are expansive and assured while the servant's are short, deferential and offered only when invited; read without the social frame, this could look simply like two different temperaments, one talkative and one reserved. Understood through the context of a household in which social position governs who may speak, how, and for how long, the same distribution of dialogue becomes a staging of power: the servant's brevity is not shyness but the only register the hierarchy permits, and the employer's expansiveness is the audible privilege of rank. The stage direction deepens the move precisely because drama can show what speech withholds — the servant continuing a task 'with lowered eyes' through the key exchange is not incidental business but the body enacting a deference the dialogue is too polite to state. Cited beside the unequal lines, the lowered eyes make the social verdict visible: the audience SEES the subordination the conversation politely declines to name. One could read the servant's restraint, alternatively, as quiet dignity rather than constraint — a self-possession that needs few words; but the lowered eyes resist that gentler reading, since the refusal to meet the employer's gaze marks the relationship as one the servant cannot meet on equal terms, however composed they appear. What the social context finally illuminates is that the scene's drama lives in its silences and its sightlines: the hierarchy is performed not in what is argued but in who is allowed to look up, so that a stage direction does more accusing than any line of dialogue could.