Time for some more female representation. Rossetti was a Victorian poet and I am so glad that I found her name on my reading list because her poems are very relevant to certain moments in my life. The one I am about to share with you reminds me of the thought I have often had, when I question where or how I first met some of the most important people in my life. And it frustrates me when I cannot recall, as if it had not mattered enough at the time for my brain to recognise it as important. Rossetti captures all of this in her poem:
I Wish I Could Remember That First Day
I Wish I Could Remember That First Day
I wish I could remember that first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me,
If bright or dim the season, it might be
Summer or Winter for aught I can say;
So unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was I to see and to foresee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom yet for many a May.
If only I could recollect it, such
A day of days! I let it come and go
As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow;
It seemed to mean so little, meant so much;
If only now I could recall that touch,
First touch of hand in hand – Did one but know!
Let's start at the end for a change. As I have said, I often suffer the same problem as depicted here, and she recognises that she is not alone; the general pronoun 'one' ends the poem after written in a first person narrative, so gives the personal emotion but then the reflective inclusion of the reader.
By covering different lengths of time, through 'bright or dim' to 'summer or winter', we see that the relationship she has had has spanned years, meaning it is all the more important to her. And thus, it is all the more upsetting for her not to remember even the season in which she met the narrattee of the poem.
I find the repetition of various different items, such as 'first', 'so' and 'if' mimics her attempt to recall the same thoughts and memories over and over again. Even the rhyme scheme, with only four phonological rhymes, maintains this, as once you think you have lost the 'a' or the 'b' rhyme, it returns, due to the Petrarchan sonnet form. You can hear her sifting through the same memories, checking each one over and over but never quite reaching the hoped-for conclusion.