Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come to me in the speaking silence of a dream;
One of the main reasons that “Echo” resonates so well emotionally is because of Rossetti’s apt use of contradiction through oxymoron. Again, an oxymoron occurs when two contradicting terms are used to describe the same thing. Early in the poem, Rossetti employs oxymoron in the phrase “Come in the speaking silence of a dream,” immediately establishing the poem’s tension between longing and joy; reality and memory or dreams; and life and death.
All of these ideas establish binary relationships, where one idea can be defined only by relying on the other. For instance, there can be no life without death, no longing without the memory of the experience of joy. Furthermore, there can be no understanding of silence without first understanding what it means to fill that silence with speech. Rossetti’s use of oxymoron in the phrase “speaking silence of a dream” does away with these binary relationships, at once establishing them so that her speaker might inhabit the space between speaking and silence, life and death, or memory and reality.
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of unfinished years.
O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
These three lines—the last lines of stanza 1 and the first line of stanza 2—arguably stand as “Echo’s” most important. Here Rossetti introduces the conflict and interplay between memory and dreams, two related but vastly different phenomena. Memory, the speaker suggests, occurs as something immediately sad, visceral, and more directly connected to reality: “Come back in tears” the speaker call to memory, begging for something like a repeat of the past, a time that seems “unfinished” and full of “hope” and “love.” One might describe this repeating as a form of echo.
This all occurs in direct contrast to line 1 of stanza 2, where the speaker now shifts towards an invocation of dreams. Dreams, unlike memory, appear first as something not sad, but rather sweet. Whereas memory seems to replay in the speaker’s mind much like a recording—her experiences appear largely the same in memory on each recall—her dreams seem to distill and double down. With each dream, the sweetness increases, but to ill effect. In a sort of reverse echo, the dream first appears as “sweet,” then “too sweet,” and finally “too bitter sweet,” becoming something overbearing, loud, and more present than memories, which tend to fade like an echo.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again, though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
With this line, Rossetti presents the climax of her poem; here, the speaker chooses her dreams over her memories. By beginning the stanza with the word “yes,” Rossetti indicates to readers that the speaker understands her own mistake—choosing dreams over memories effectively amounts to choosing death over life. Her dreams, although they will echo her “very life again….Pulse for pulse, breath for breath,” still render her body “cold in death,” her life nothing more than the perversion of memory and experience through dreams.
