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The Victorian period (1837–1901) brought new pressures to bear on love poetry. The rigid social codes governing gender, sexuality, and respectability created a culture of surfaces — of what could be said and what must remain hidden. Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy both wrote against these constraints, though in very different ways. Rossetti's "Remember" is a quiet, devastating sonnet in which a dying woman instructs her lover on how to grieve; Hardy's "The Ruined Maid" is a savagely ironic dialogue that exposes the hypocrisy of Victorian sexual morality. Pairing them is unusually rewarding for the comparative paper because they attack the same Victorian construction of womanhood — the self-sacrificing "angel" and the "fallen" woman — from opposite directions and in opposite registers, one in the elevated Petrarchan sonnet, the other in popular ballad dialect.
This lesson belongs to AQA A-Level English Literature A (7712), Paper 1, Love Through the Ages: poetry (pre-1900), where poems are read comparatively across the ages. These two Victorian poems let you trace how love, gender and respectability were contested at the height of the period. The Assessment Objectives in play:
Flagging the dominant AOs: This pairing turns on AO2 and AO4. The comparison is impossible without showing how Rossetti's closed sonnet form enacts restraint and selflessness while Hardy's open ballad dialogue stages irony and exposure — and how each poet recruits a different inherited form to interrogate the same gender ideology (AO3 as the lever). AO5 supplies the competing readings; AO1 threads the argument.
Before the close analysis it helps to see what unites these very different poems: both are responses to a single Victorian construction of femininity, organised around the opposition of the pure woman and the fallen woman. Respectable ideology idealised the woman as selfless, domestic and sexually innocent — Coventry Patmore's phrase "the angel in the house" became shorthand for the type — while it condemned to social death any woman who transgressed sexually. Rossetti's poem works inside the first half of that ideology, voicing a dying woman whose generosity looks at first like the very self-effacement the culture demanded — and then complicating it. Hardy's poem detonates the second half, taking the "ruined" woman the culture pities or scorns and showing her materially thriving. To compare the poems well is to see them as two assaults on one ideology: Rossetti subtly bending the ideal of self-sacrifice from within, Hardy ironising the category of "ruin" from without.
The second thing to master is why the chosen forms matter. Rossetti writes a Petrarchan sonnet — historically the form in which a male poet addressed a silent, idealised woman. By placing a woman in the speaking position of that very form, Rossetti performs a quiet act of appropriation: the woman who was traditionally described now speaks, and the sonnet's machinery of octave, volta and sestet becomes the instrument of her agency. Hardy writes a ballad dialogue in rough couplets and dialect — a popular, accessible, oral-feeling form whose two-voiced structure lets the "ruined" woman answer back in her own idiom, without any narrator to moralise over her. Form, in both poems, is the gender-politics: the high literary sonnet seized by a woman; the low popular ballad giving the outcast woman the last word in every stanza.
Key terms to deploy precisely: octave and sestet (the eight- and six-line divisions of the Petrarchan sonnet); volta (the structural turn, here at line 9); antithesis (the balancing of opposed ideas — "forget and smile" against "remember and be sad"); dramatic irony and verbal irony; refrain (the recurring closing phrase); bathos (a deflating drop in register). As always, name nothing without stating its effect.
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) was among the most important poets of the Victorian period. She moved in the Pre-Raphaelite circle — her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — and was a devout Anglo-Catholic whose faith shaped her life and work; she twice declined offers of marriage on religious grounds. "Remember" was written in 1849, when Rossetti was only eighteen or nineteen, and published in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862).
AO3 — Separate spheres and self-sacrifice: Victorian women occupied a tightly constrained social position. The doctrine of separate spheres assigned men the public world of commerce and politics and women the private world of home and family; the idealised woman — Patmore's "angel in the house" — was selfless, devotional and self-effacing. Women poets faced the further difficulty of writing within traditions defined by male desire — the sonnet above all, a form in which men spoke and women were spoken about. Rossetti's achievement in "Remember" is to seize that form and make it a vehicle for female speech and agency, and then to push the ideal of feminine self-sacrifice to a point where its meaning becomes double-edged.
"Remember" is a Petrarchan sonnet — an octave rhyming ABBAABBA and a sestet (here CDDECE). The Petrarchan form carries its history with it: traditionally the male poet's instrument for addressing a silent, idealised beloved. Rossetti reverses the polarity, so that the woman speaks and the man is the addressed, silent party. The volta at line 9 — "Yet if you should forget me for a while" — is the structural pivot on which the whole poem turns, converting a plea for remembrance into a gift of release.
The Octave:
"Remember me when I am gone away, / Gone far away into the silent land"
The opening imperative — "Remember me" — is at once a request and a command, and the anaphora of "Remember me" will organise the octave. "Gone away" is a euphemism for death, softened further by the dreamy "silent land", which figures death as a remote place rather than an annihilation. The repetition "Gone... Gone far away" stretches the distance across the line-break, making the parting feel like an ever-receding journey.
"When you can no more hold me by the hand, / Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay."
The physical intimacy of "hold me by the hand" is tender and specific — the loss is rendered as the loss of a particular touch. "Half turn to go yet turning stay" is one of the most delicately rhythmical lines in Victorian poetry: it captures the gesture of someone leaving but unable quite to leave, and the cluster of stressed verbs — "turn", "go", "turning", "stay" — sets up a rocking, hesitating movement that the ear feels as reluctance. The line enacts the very lingering it describes.
"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."
"Our future that you planned" quietly discloses the relationship's power dynamic: it is his plan that constitutes their shared "future", the woman the participant rather than the architect — a detail the poem notices without protest, and which strong candidates can read against the agency she will seize at the volta. "It will be late to counsel then or pray" introduces urgency and finality: after death there will be no more advising and no more interceding; the time for the living to act is now.
The Volta and Sestet:
"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,"
The volta transforms the poem. The governing imperative shifts from "remember" to "do not grieve", and the speaker who spent the octave asking to be remembered now grants the beloved permission to forget. The lines are syntactically careful: "if the darkness and corruption leave / A vestige of the thoughts that once I had" imagines that the grave's "darkness and corruption" might leave behind only a trace — a "vestige" — of how she once thought of him, or of how he thought of her. The point is conditional and tender: even a remnant of memory is not worth his sorrow. The conditional "if... leave / A vestige" is the hinge on which the closing couplet's renunciation depends.
"Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad."
The final couplet is devastating in its selflessness. The speaker sacrifices her own desire for remembrance to protect the beloved's happiness. The antithesis is perfectly weighted — "forget and smile" against "remember and be sad" — and the preference for his contentment over her own posthumous survival in memory is an extraordinary act of love. Yet the gesture is double: in giving him leave to forget, she also controls the terms of her own forgetting, exercising at the threshold of death an authority over her memory that the man never claims.
AO5 — Different Interpretations: Isobel Armstrong reads the poem as a subtle assertion of female power — the dying woman controls the terms of her own remembrance and, in granting permission to forget, performs a generosity the living man cannot match. Angela Leighton, in Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, sees the selflessness as also a form of self-erasure, the woman disappearing not only from life but from memory, perfecting the Victorian ideal of the self-effacing woman even as the poem seems to transcend it. Dinah Roe reads the poem in the light of Rossetti's own renunciations — her refusals of marriage, her devotion to a faith that demanded the subordination of personal desire — as a meditation on relinquishment that is religious as much as romantic.
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) is best known as a novelist but considered himself primarily a poet. "The Ruined Maid" was written in 1866 (Hardy dates it "Westbourne Park Villas, 1866") but withheld until 1901, when it appeared in Poems of the Past and the Present. The long delay reflects its provocative subject: it treats a "fallen woman" — a woman who has had sex outside marriage — not with pity or condemnation but with sharp, amused, deeply subversive irony.
AO3 — The double standard and the "fallen woman": In Victorian England a woman's sexual purity was held to be her chief social asset; a woman who lost her virginity before marriage, or who took to prostitution, was "ruined" in the eyes of respectable society and could be cast out of it. The Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s allowed the authorities to detain women suspected of prostitution and subject them to compulsory medical examination, while their male clients faced nothing — a legal embodiment of the sexual double standard by which men were expected to have sexual experience and women were destroyed by it. The "fallen woman" was a stock figure of Victorian art and fiction, usually a tragic victim destined for death or degradation. Hardy's poem detonates the cliché by making his "ruined" woman conspicuously better off than her virtuous friend.
The poem is a dialogue between two women: a country girl, who speaks the opening lines of each stanza, and her former neighbour 'Melia (Amelia), who has gone to Town and been "ruined". It is written in jaunty rhyming couplets with a strong, near-anapaestic swing, and it deploys a refrain: 'Melia's reply closes every stanza, always landing on the word "ruined" (or, in the last stanza, its pointed denial). The dialogue form is crucial — it lets Hardy present two voices and no narrator, withholding all explicit moral commentary so that the irony must be constructed by the reader. The bouncy metre is itself ironic: a sing-song lilt carrying a savage social indictment.
"'O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown! / Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town? / And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?' — / 'O didn't you know I'd been ruined?' said she."
The country girl is astonished by 'Melia's transformation. Her dialect exuberance — "this does everything crown!" — and the metre-stretching pronunciation of "prosperi-ty" mark her as the rustic, unpolished speaker, against the finery she is describing. The refrain-line answer — "O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" — is delivered with serene irony, and the device that runs through the whole poem is established at once: the word "ruined", which ought to name moral and social catastrophe, is attached to every visible improvement in 'Melia's condition. The gap between the word's expected meaning and its actual referent is the engine of the satire.
"'You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks, / Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks; / And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!' — / 'Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined,' said she."
Every stanza repeats the structure: the country girl itemises 'Melia's former rural poverty — rags, bare feet, back-breaking farm labour ("spudding up docks" is grubbing out weeds) — and her present urban finery, and 'Melia attributes the change to her "ruin". The humour is bleak: "ruined" is supposed to describe destruction, yet everything it is attached to — clothes, hands, complexion, speech, leisure — denotes betterment. The refrain's repetition steadily empties the moral word of its content and refills it with material success.
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