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Program Notes

In this heartbreaking text, one of the most popular works of Victorian female poet Christina Rossetti (1830 – 1894), a lover is asking to be remembered when gone away, “gone far away into the silent land”. When the two can no longer hold hands, nor tell each other of future plans, she asks only to be remembered. It is an incredibly moving story of undying love beyond death, a theme that so many of Rossetti’s poems center around. Yet being remembered is not what is most important to the speaker; even more important to her is that her lover finds peace in her heart after she has passed. And so, she tells her lover not to grieve should she forget her for a while, for “better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.”