Remember

Although far from a scandalous poem, “Remember,” in introducing the implied intimacy of two lovers holding hands, introduces a level of physical intimacy—a level of intimacy, by the way, the speaker lists as the first thing she will miss. “When you can no more hold me by the hand […] Remember me” (Lines 3, 5). Holding hands would be pretty hot stuff for Victorian England. For a straightlaced Victorian culture that viewed any open discussions about sex as scandalous, the poem uses the symbols of holding hands to suggest the potent physical connection between the two lovers. Holding hands suggests the defiant catapult across boundaries of conventional propriety, the intensity of the emotional connection that cannot be held back. In a poem centered on separation and the act of moving away from others, holding hands suggests the fragile power of connection, a defiance of what the speaker acknowledges awaits her too soon, the separation of death itself.

It should be noted that the speaker acknowledging that in death their hands will be forever parted from his, noting that “he” can no longer hold her “by the hand,” has been taken to suggest a triumphant feminism, a freeing of the speaker. That reading is bolstered two lines later when the speaker acknowledges that she is ready to follow his lead, acknowledging that he tells the speaker about their future, which suggests she is compelled to play a subservient role to her husband.