Summary
“Echo” opens with urgency, the speaker calling out for something to “come…in the silence of the night,” and one immediately senses the speaker’s longing for something not present. But what does she summon? At first Rossetti offers no clear answer, but implies perhaps a person by the attributes she invokes. The speaker summons this entity to come with “bright eyes,” “soft cheeks,” and “tears.” But by the end of the first stanza, it becomes clear that the speaker calls upon not a person, but rather “memory” personified.
As the second stanza begins, the speaker blurs the poem's addressee. It is now not just memory, but a dream, and her speaker now calls out for the sweetness of that dream. The poem begins to "echo" itself, repeating the word sweet three times in line 7, and the last note of “too bitter sweet” signals that something is amiss. Now, in stanza 2, Rossetti complicates the poem as the speaker reveals that her dream does not correspond with a waking reality. Death enters into the poem when the speaker alludes to "Paradise," the heaven for faithful souls who have died and found favor with God. Now it becomes clear that the speaker’s memories and dreams must in fact be of someone lost, someone already dead. When she awakens though, the speaker finds herself living in the world, the eyes of the one she misses closed, like a door that “lets out no more” love.
The echo of the opening stanza returns in the beginning of stanza 3. Here, the speaker begins to conflate not only dreams with memory, but also dreams with reality: “Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live/My very life again though cold in death” Rossetti writes. She reasons that since dreams contain memories of life, she might be able to live again through her dreams. The thought is disturbing and tragic, painting a picture of a speaker who is convinced that life has nothing more to offer, and so wants to give it up in favor of dwelling in the reflection of the past. The poem closes with the speaker making clear that such a dream-life stands as a one-to-one exchange, evinced in lines 4 and 5: “pulse for pulse, breath for breath.” Only after this, in the poem’s final line, does the speaker make a direct address to her real subject: “my love,” who must have lived “long ago.”
Analysis
"Echo" stands as a profound exploration of existential longing. Form, repetition, rhyme, and changes in meter all allow Rossetti to offer a snapshot of the mind of a speaker who conflates memory with dreams and dreams with reality. In stanza one, Rossetti’s immediate use of direct address sets a tone of urgency and longing, compounded by the three trochees (stressed syllables) of “Come,” “silence,” and “night.” Although she is alone, the oxymoronic and alliterative phrase “speaking silence” suggests that perhaps she is not as alone as one might think. Instead, the “-s” alliteration plays off of the oxymoron, suggesting that the speaker’s silence lies pregnant with whispers, not quite present. Now, the sense of urgent longing becomes even more apparent with the anaphora (repetition) of her direct address “Come,” which repeats at the beginning of each line. Like the title of the poem, the anaphora of “come” works much like an echo for Rossetti, suggesting the sort of incessant wave of longing her speaker feels, and her attempt to summon memories of past love again and again.
Besides repetition, stanza one also establishes “Echo” as a sextilla, a medieval Spanish/Portuguese poem that uses three stanzas of six lines rhyming ABABCC or AABCCB to tell a story, often of love. The sextilla’s rhyme scheme and set stanza number/length afford Rossetti the ability to create a poem with a clear narrative: “Echo” contains a beginning, middle, and end correlated with each of the three stanzas. While the original sextilla form calls for a strict octosyllabic line, resulting in a song-like rhythm, Rossetti varies the meter and syllable count of each line. This allows her to establish a mournful and longing tone, since her lines can contain several long-stressed syllables like line 1’s “Come to me in the silence of the night,” or short, almost muted utterances like line 5’s “come back in tears.” Readers during Rossetti’s time would have recognized the form and known of its medieval origins. The long history of the sextilla’s form would have underlined many of the themes Rossetti addresses in the poem, including memory and the speaker’s desire to repeat her life.
Thus, like the speaker’s memories and feelings of longing, repetition seems unavoidable in the poem. In line 1 of stanza 2, Rossetti abandons anaphora for an in-line repetition that suggests a sense of spacing and degradation. Repeatedly, she calls upon her dream, three times characterizing it as “sweet.” However, just as an echo travels further, and becomes weaker with every iteration, Rossetti’s repetition of “sweet” degrades: first described contentedly as “sweet,” next distastefully “too sweet,” and finally undesirably “too bitter sweet.” Through this subtle play with repetition and spacing, Rossetti aptly generates the speaker’s feelings: she longs for a memory/dream of someone, and in constantly calling upon that memory, she finds herself further away from the moment that memory was created, each remembrance a corruption, a degradation.
That theme of degradation continues in stanza 2's second line, when Rossetti alludes to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton’s epic poem is arguably one of the most famous pieces of Western literature, and both Rossetti and her audience would have been greatly familiar with its narrative. In Paradise Lost, Milton re-tells the ancient Judeo-Christian biblical story of the first humans, Adam and Eve, who lost favor with God after falling victim to the lies of Satan. Like any good epic poem, Paradise Lost contains tragic elements, and the so-called fall from God’s grace stands as central. Like Adam and Eve, now tortured by the memories they shared living in the Paradise of the Garden of Eden, the speaker also feels herself recalling the paradise of past love, pleading to be reunited with her love, but realizing that this is impossible. The implication of the last lines of stanza 2, which speak of “thirsting longing eyes” that “watch the slow door” of love close, is that the speaker’s lover has died, and she can no long see the love and light in his eyes, a door to Paradise that “lets out no more” love or joy.
Still, this realization that her Paradise remains beyond reach gets tossed aside with Rossetti’s use of “yet” at the beginning of line 1 stanza 3. “Yet come to me in dreams,” she says, dismissing all of the mournful reality of stanza 2, so that, “I may live/My very life again though cold in death.” The striking imagery of a cold, dead body still capable of living is disturbing. The speaker chooses a sort of living death, where she contentedly calls upon memories and dreams from beyond the distance and degradation established before. She would rather trade her life for a tracing, paying out in an economy of remembrance every waking moment “pulse for pulse, breath for breath.”
“Echo” ends on an echo, with the refrain of stanza 1’s “come to me,” but this time Rossetti says, “come back to me in dreams,” doubling down on the circular pattern of re-membrance already established throughout the poem. The final two lines of the poem underline, in a somber tone, the speaker’s difficult situation. “Speak low, lean low/As long ago, my love, how long ago.” Just as her love remains trapped syntactically, sandwiched between the two separate “long ago’s,” so does Rossetti’s speaker remain trapped in an echo of the past, her life a prison whose walls are guarded by memories.
