“Echo”, by Christina Rosetti, is a poem with passionate and evocative language that deals with the emotions of death and dreams. The speaker has obviously lost a loved one years back and chases an “echo” or memory of that person through their dreams. The “slow door that opening, letting in, lets out no more” seems like a somber metaphor for death as the speaker knows that the dreams are limited because the loved one will never come back to life. There is also a strong presence of alliteration , such as “speaking silence of a dream” and sunlight on a stream.” Along with this, Rosetti uses a ton of repetition throughout, with each stanza having their own repetitious pattern usually with he first word of the lines. The use of alliteration and repetition offers a very pleasing and sweet sounding flow, but at the same time is so explicit that it is very dark and somber. The speaker seems to be fond of their loved one and completely obsessed in my opinion. Although, the more deeply emotional thing for me is that I think the speaker is depressed and cannot survive day to day life without their ability to dream and pretend that their loved one is still alive in some way, which is a terrifying reliance. Expressions such as “pulse for pulse” and “breath for breath” embody the things that allow for life to happen, and I think offering to give that to their loved one portrays the serious dependance that the speaker has. I would assume the speaker has very distressing and bleak days, counting down the hours until it is nighttime so they can revive some sort of “echo.” Dreams, in this poem, signify the past life of the speaker and their loved one and there is an inverted dynamic here of dreams offering more life and color to our speaker than actual life does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Echo”, by Christina Rosetti, is a poem with passionate and evocative language that deals with the emotions of death and dreams. The speaker has obviously lost a loved one years back and chases an “echo” or memory of that person through their dreams. The “slow door that opening, letting in, lets out no more” seems … Continue reading My love life is still good, but only when I’m dreaming<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3927,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3927"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}