1. Remembrance
Emily Bronte By

2. Emily Bronte was born on July 30th 1818 at Thornton, Bradford in Yorkshire, fifth child of the six children.
Her mother died of cancer in 1821.
In 1824 she attended the newly opened Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge.
While there along with her sisters Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte they suffer the harsh regime, cold and poor food.
In June 1825 Emily and her sisters were finally taken away from the school for good.
Emily and Anne write poetry and stories for their imaginary world of Gondal. Few survive, but they worked together on poems and the Gondal sagas into the 1840's

3. Historical Background
A poem titled "Remembrance" would have raised certain expectations in 1846.
Other titles Emily Brontë assigned her poems in the volume the three sisters published at their own expense--"Sympathy," "Hope," "The Prisoner (A Fragment)," and the inevitable "Stanzas" and "Song"--would also have been familiar to nineteenth-century readers,
"Remembrance" is remarkable for its ubiquity in the period and for the particular associations it would have evoked.
In 1846, "Remembrance" was already the title of published poems by many poets, including Shelley, Byron, L. E. L., and Southey, whose "Remembrance" Brontë almost certainly read.
It includes a phrase--"harass'd heart"--which she echoed in two poems, including one on sleep, beginning, "Sleep brings no joy to me / Remembrance never dies."

4. Brontë's conviction that remembrance never dies, even in sleep, anticipates Freud.
Recognises that there is no cure for memory, psychoanalysis presents itself as a cure for forgetting or pretending to forget by turning symptoms, which are like monuments in the patient's psyche, into conscious memories, available for processing.
Brontë's protest against death requires the survival of remembrance, and like Freud, she is alert to how memory threatens that survival. Her poem "Remembrance" turns on the axis of this dense psychological contradiction.

5. Summary
Except for its brevity, Emily Brontë’s lyrical poem “Remembrance” contains all of the characteristics of an elegy.
Its subject is the mourning of the death of a beloved; the poem is meditative; the poet attempts to come to terms with the death of her lover from the past; finally, there is some evidence that the poet accepts her loss and finds solace, at long last.
The persona of the poem may or may not be Emily Brontë herself. Biographers have tried unsuccessfully to identify a young man from her youth whose death could have later given occasion.

6. Structure
This poem is written in Iambic pentameter and uses the ABAB rhyme scheme.
She also uses repetition, "Cold in the Earth" from the first and third stanzas of her poem.

7. The theme of this poem is love and death, it is based on a romance she once endured which allows her to express her personal and intimate feelings.

8. Examples
Emily opens Remembrance with lots of negative images. 'Cold in the Earth' is an image of a cold dead body buried in the ground.
This body is the loved one talked about in the poem. Deep snow piled above thee.
Snow is an image of winter which personifies death a links in with the cold in the earth opening.
The world piled sounds unnatural as if someone has piled the snow and it hasn't landed there naturally.

9. Tone And Setting
The poem is meditative. Its been fifteen years since her loved one past. It is winter now in the month of December!
How does this effect the mood and atmosphere?

10. Analyzing The Poem
Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee, Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave! Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave? 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 That noble heart for ever, ever more? Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers From those brown hills have melted into spring: Faithful indeed is the spirit that remembers After such years of change and suffering! Sweet Love of youth, forgive if I forget thee, While the world's tide is bearing me along: Sterner desires and other hopes beset me, Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!

11. No later light has lightened up my heaven; No second morn has ever shone for me: All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given, All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee. But when the days of golden dreams had perished, And even Despair was powerless to destroy, Then did I learn how existence could be cherished, Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy; Then did I check the tears of useless passion, Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine; Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten Down to that tomb already more than mine. And even yet I dare not let it languish, Dare not indulge in Memory's rapturous pain; Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?

12. Meaning of the Poem
She feels guilty because she forgotten her lover and because she no longer misses him. this is evident where it says, \"have i forgot, my only love, to love thee?\". It makes complete sense, because when you forget the person that you once loved, they are truly gone. A person only really dies when their memory dies, not when their body turns cold.
Its subject is the mourning of the death of a beloved; the poem is meditative; the poet attempts to come to terms with the death of her lover from the past; finally, there is some evidence that the poet accepts her loss and finds solace, at long last.