Remembrance Summary

The poem starts off with the speaker at her lover’s grave. She describes the time since he has left her and suggests her love is fading the longer she is without him. She feels conflicted as she feels her pain decreasing, while realizing that this is also her memory of him diminishing with the passage of time. Simultaneously, she comments that their relationship was “life's bliss" and mourns the fact that she will never witness a love like this again. However, as she describes her beloved, the speaker goes on to say that she cannot waste her life in mourning. And so, she says, she "checked her tears of useless passion" and tells herself not to bring herself “down to that tomb" where the man she loved now lies. She ends the poem by stating that she cannot reside in the pain of the past.