Echo

By Christina Rossetti

Come to me in the silence of the night;

Come in the speaking silence of a dream;

Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright

As sunlight on a stream;

Come back in tears,

O memory, hope, love of finished years.

Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,

Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,

Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;

Where thirsting longing eyes

Watch the slow door

That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live

My very life again tho’ cold in death:

Come back to me in dreams, that I may give

Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:

Speak low, lean low,

As long ago, my love, how long ago.

Ghosts make frequent appearances in the poetry of Christina Rossetti, and it is through these ghosts that she explores themes of memory, loss, and grief. Sometimes, Rossetti’s ghosts speak to comfort (Remember), sometimes they speak of being grieved for (After Death), and sometimes, as in this poem, Echo, they speak of longing with no return. The ghost in Echo remains tethered to the mortal world - to a lover left behind, to a memory of the life that was.

Giving voice to the dead, Rossetti’s poems on these themes have added poignancy. Her ghosts are not speaking of entering the world beyond, they are speaking of time cut short, a love left behind unwillingly.

Come to me in the silence of the night;

Come in the speaking silence of a dream;

Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright

As sunlight on a stream;

Come back in tears,

O memory, hope, love of finished years.

On first reading, this appears as a living person grieving for a lover now deceased. We read it as the living pleading for the dead to visit them in dreams. But, as the poem goes on, and the ghostly voice becomes apparent, we see that this is grief inverted - a reciprocal mourning. The dead lover beckons the one left behind, still living, into the nocturnal world. Interestingly, the deceased wants the lover to come to them “in tears”, indicating that the dead speaker wants to be mourned, wants the lover left behind to cry for “memory, hope, love of finished years.”

Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,

Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,

Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;

Where thirsting longing eyes

Watch the slow door

That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Here is where we are alerted to the inverted grieving. The dead lover is in a kind of limbo, a liminal state between life and death. Their “wakening should have been in Paradise,” yet they have awoken from death at the door that once passed through “lets out no more.”

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live

My very life again tho’ cold in death:

Come back to me in dreams, that I may give

Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:

Speak low, lean low,

As long ago, my love, how long ago.

In this final stanza the dead speaker pleads to be relived, to be be given “My very life again,” if only in dreams. The speaker is prepared to exist in simulation, almost, inhabiting not the space between life and death, but the liminal space between the living lovers consciousness and subconsciousness - in their dreams.

It is important, also, to examine the title itself. Echo, in the context of the poem, relates to the origin of the word - the mythical Greek figure, the nymph named Echo, cursed by the Goddess Hera to only repeat the last words spoken to her. In this myth, Echo falls in love with Narcissus, but bound by Hera’s curse, cannot express her love. She can only speak the last words Narcissus says.

Rejected by Narcissus, she remains by his side nonetheless, watching as he wastes away before his own reflection, unable to take himself away from it. After his death, Echo mourns over his body, and in time begins to waste away too, until all that remained was the sound of her voice.

In the poem, the dead speaker cannot be restored, they can only come to the lover left behind as an echo of who they once was.