Romanticizing the past
Christina Rossetti was a poet writing at the end of Romanticism, and thus her poetry often takes up the themes and motifs of the Romantic poets. One of the most prevalent notions among the Romantic poets was the deeply held feeling and belief that the past was often better than the present. Furthermore, some Romantics even held that the present was an ongoing degradation of the past, and that a return to classical or medieval ideas and modes of experience might constitute a more fulfilling and vibrant human experience. Thus, one should not be surprised to see Rossetti’s speaker in “Echo” mirroring some of these Romantic traits. From the outset, her speaker is plagued by the desire to regain what she used to have. She lies awake in bed, terribly unhappy, pleading with her memory to return her to her past experiences, specifically the presence of a past love. Through both memory and dreams, the speaker believes she can bring back her lover and happiness, thus exchanging her current life for the memory or dream of a better time buried in her past.
Remembrance as Echo
Although Rossetti never uses the word "echo" in the poem itself, she uses literary techniques to invoke the idea of an echo on a more abstract level. In addition to linguistic techniques that approximate the experience of an echo, like in-line repetition, parallel structure, and anaphora (repeating the same word at the beginning of each new clause), Rossetti also describes memories in a way that makes them seem like a kind of psychic echo. In stanza 1, the speaker presents herself as longing in the middle of the night, calling upon memory to “come to me in the silence of the night;/come in the speaking silence of a dream,” much like an echo might come bouncing off of some surface. Yet the return of memory, like an echo, appears uncanny—both are extensions of one’s own experience, externalized and fed back to oneself. A memory, although encountered by the mind as something external like a video to be watched, is also generated by the mind itself; this prevents it from fulfilling the speaker in the way she wishes. Later in the poem, when it becomes clear that the speaker yearns for a lost lover, this dissatisfaction with memory becomes more potent: a memory, like an echo, does not embody an experience, but rather fades like sound bouncing off of bedroom walls, a disembodied lover whispering “in the speaking silence of the night.”
Dreaming as Death
"Echo" links dreaming and death: dreams appear as a portal to the afterlife, and death itself seems like a dream. In stanza 2, the speaker laments that she has awoken from her dream into life, rather than "Paradise" (which would come only after death). Then, she addresses her memory and asks for it to come to her in dreams, where she hopes to trade her own life "breath for breath" for the remembered one. Her dream itself, then, becomes a kind of fantasy of death, of giving up the experience of life in order to enjoy the passive state of a permanent "dream."
Rossetti was by no means the first to imagine the sleeping body as a dead body. Just think about Shakespeare’s tragic Romeo and Juliet. Here, Juliet takes a sleeping potion meant to create the illusion of death, and to great effect. As her breathing shallows, temperature drops, and motion ceases, her family becomes so thoroughly convinced that she is dead, that they inter her. Even her lover, Romeo, believes Juliet to be dead, and thus takes his own life. Shakespeare’s sleep not only mimics death, but also ushers it in. Another Shakespeare character, Hamlet, famously speculates, while contemplating suicide, that death may be like a dream. Likewise, Rossetti’s speaker imagines a form of dreaming that approaches death, and in doing so, fantasizes an escape from her life.
