Echo Essay Questions

Explain how Christina Rossetti uses form to create a sense of narrative in “Echo.”

In “Echo,” Christina Rossetti employs a medieval Spanish poetic form called a “sextilla” to create a sense of narrative. The sextilla works remarkably well for creating narrative because it employs three stanzas of equal, 6-line length, which creates a natural sense of beginning, middle, and end. Rossetti realizes this, and uses the poem’s form to her own narrative advantage. Stanza one introduces the speaker as the main character experiencing an intense longing for a past experience. She calls upon her memory for relief, but to no avail. This causes her, in stanza two, to look towards dreaming as an alternative to memory. But dreaming, she realizes, always ends with her waking up, instead of remaining in the Paradise of the dream. This sets up the poem’s climax in stanza 3, where the speaker then chooses to always dream, eschewing life and accepting a death-like sleep where she relives her memories of her former life without the echo-like degradation of her memory.

Explain some of the ways in which Rossetti plays with the idea of echo in her poem.

In “Echo,” Christina Rossetti uses a number of literary devices, both linguistic and conceptual, to riff on the concept of an echo. In the first place, she uses linguistic tools like anaphora and alliteration to recreate the sense, sonically, of an echo. Phrases like “come to me” return throughout the poem, like an echo bouncing off of the walls, while the alliteration of repeating “-s” sounds in “speaking-silence” create an almost echo like effect in both cadence and sound. Elsewhere, Rossetti uses the concept of an echo conceptually to redefine memory as a type of echo. Much like a sound that repeats and eventually fades to silence, Rossetti’s speaker realizes that her memory too, although able to repeat, degrades with time.