The Rhymes in Christina Rossetti’s Echo

In the collar-stanza lyric verse Echo, Christina Rossetti wonts poetry as a sort of saying that one might regain in dreams a get along that is lost in realit. As the dream of love is to the real love, so is an reverberate to an original sound. From the comparison comes the title of the poem and also Rossettis unique drill of rhyme. Aspects of her rhyme be the lyric pattern, the forms and qualities of the rhymng words, and the special use of repetition.The rhyme pattern is simple, and, like rhyme generally, it may be survey of as a pattern of echoes. Each stanza contains four lines of alternating rhymes conclude by a couplet a b a b c c. There are nine separate rhymes throughout the poem, three in each stanza. Only twain words are utilize for each rhyme no rhyme is used twice. Of the viiieen rhymed words, siseteen almost all are of one syllable. The remaining two words consist of two and three syllables. With such a dandy number of single-syllable words, the rhy mes are all rising ones, on the accented halves of iambic feet, and the end-of-line emphasis is on simple words.The grammatical forms and positions of the riming words fetch support to the inward, introspective subject matter. Although there is variety, more than half the rime words are nouns. There are ten in all, and eight are placed as the objects of prepositions. Such enclosure helps the utterer strain her yearning to relive her love within dreams. Also, the repeated verb come in stanzas 1 and 3 is in the form of commands to the absent lover. A thorough study shows that most of the verbal energy in the stanzas is in the depression parts of the lines, leaving the rhymes to occur in elements modifying the verbs, as in these lines coif to me in the silence of the niqht (1)Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live (13)My very life again though cold in death (14)Most of the other rhymes are also in such infixedized positions. The free rhyming verbs occur in subordinate claus es, and the nouns that are non the objects of prepositions are the subject (10) and object (11) of the same subordinate clause.The qualities of the rhyming words are also consistent with the poem emphasis on the speakers internal life. Most of the words are impressionistic. Even the cover words stream, tears, eyes, door, and breath reflect the speakers mental actor rather than describe reality. In this regard, the rhyming words of 1 and 3 are effective. These are night and bright which contrast the bleakness of the speakers condition, on the one hand, with the vitality of her inner life, on the other. another(prenominal) effective contrast is in 14 and 16, where death and breath are rhymed. This rhyme may be taken to illustrate the sad accompaniment that even though the speakers love is past, it can until now live in present memory just as an echo continues to sound.It is in emphasizing how memory echoes experience that Rossetti creates the special use of rhyming words. There is an ingenious but not obtrusive repetition of a number of words echoes. The major echoing word is of course the verb come, which appears six times at the beginnings of lines in stanzas 1 and 3. But rhyming words, stressing as they do the ends of lines, are also repeated systematically. The most notable is dream, the rhyming word in 2. Rossetti repeats the word in 7 and uses the plural in 13 and 15. In 7 the rhyming word sweet is the ternion use of the word, a climax of how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet. utmost the poem, Rossetti repeats breath (16), low (17), and the phrase long ago (18). This special use of repetition justifies the title Echo, and it also stresses the major idea that it is only in ones memory that past experience has reality, even if dreams are no more than echoes.Thus rhyme is not just nonfunctional in Echo, but integral. The skill of Rossetti here is the same as in her half-serious, half-mocking poem Eve, even though the two poems are totally differen t. In Eve, she uses very plain rhyming words together with comically intend double rhymes. In Echo, her subject might be called fanciful and perchance even morbid, but the easiness of the rhyming words, like the diction of the poem generally, keeps the focus on regret and yearning rather than self-indulgence. As in all rhyming poems, Rossettis rhymes emphasize the conclusions of her lines. The rhymes go beyond this effect, however, because of the internal repetition echoes of the rhyming words, Echo is a poem in which rhyme is inseparable from meaning.