Echo Literary Elements

"Echo" utilizes a first-person singular speaker, a technique characteristic of both Rossetii and the lyrical genre she implements here. The first-person speaker allows Rossetti to create emotion and connect the speaker with the reader of the poem.

Rossetti uses the medieval Spanish poetic form called a “sextilla.” The sextilla consists of three, six-line stanzas with a rhyme scheme of ABABCC or AABCCB; Rossetti uses the former. As for meter, Rossetti only loosely adheres to the sextilla’s conventional 8 syllable lines, as she sometimes gains and loses syllables, all dependent on her inconsistent meter. The meter begins with trochees, or stressed syllables, in the first stanza but later alternates to a more conventional and rhythmic iambic foot. These inconsistencies reflect the arc of feeling—passion, longing, sadness, and desire to name only a few—that the narrator is experiencing.

The proverbial bright eyes of memory are compared, via simile, to the sun shining on a stream.

“Echo” contains several instances of alliteration and assonance:

1. “Come to me in the speaking silence of a dream”

Alliteration: Here Rossetti alliterates these “-s” consonants to the effect of mimicking a whisper.

2. “Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;”

Assonance: The repetition of the “-oul” vowel sound in “souls,” when spoken, makes the mouth enact the meaning of the line. Just like the soul overflowing with love, the “-oul” sound, repeated three times, makes one’s mouth feel full with vowels, nearly overflowing as the line is read aloud.

In “Echo” Rossetti employs a specific type of irony called “oxymoron,” which occurs when two contradicting terms are used together, in conjunction. “Echo’s” oxymoron occurs in line 2 when the speaker says, “Come in the speaking silence of a dream.” This contradiction between “speaking” and “silence” works to raise the poem's emotional stakes, giving the speaker a tone of distress, the silence she feels perhaps inhabited by the whispers of memories.

Sextilla

Although the setting of the poem is unknown, one might conclude from all of the mentions of dreaming that the speaker lies awake in her bed at night, perhaps moving in and out of sleep.

The tone of “Echo” is complex and oscillates between longing, sadness, desperation, and a need for redemption.

The nameless narrator is the protagonist of the poem and she battles with her memory, the poem’s antagonist, as she fails to retrieve some long-lost experience.

In “Echo,” Christina Rossetti grapples with the existential issue of how memories, dreams, and reality all relate. Her speaker longs not only for memories, but also for the people, places, and things contained in those memories. What are memories and dreams,” she seems to ask, “if not at least shadows of something real?”

The climax of the poem occurs in the last stanza when the speaker settles for accepting her dreams as reality, for using memory as a mode of life. “Come back to me in dreams, that I may live/My very life again…” In dreaming Rossetti’s speaker admits to preferring a sort of shadow life, one lived only in memories and dreams.

When Rossetti uses the word "Paradise" in the second line of stanza 2, she alludes not only to the Judeo-Christian conception of an afterlife for the faithful (heaven), but also to John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. By calling upon Milton’s account of Adam and Eve’s original sinning against God in their own garden Paradise, Rossetti quickly aligns her speaker with these tragic figures. In “Echo,” the speaker lives with a Paradise Lost, something that exists only in memory.

The phrases "pulse for pulse, breath for breath" in lines 4 and 5 of stanza 3 are an example of synecdoche. These two functions of the body are used to represent all of the functions of a living experience.

Through direct address, Rossetti's speaker personifies both memory and dreams. This personification is not a conventional attribution of human qualities to something inanimate, but by issuing commands to dreams and memory—"Come to me," for example—Rossetti implies that the dreams or memories might respond.