“Remember,” with its carefully metered lines and rigidly patterned rhymes, clearly follows the template for a Petrarchan sonnet, a genre of lyrical poetry defined more than four centuries before Rossetti by Italian poet Francesco Petrarcha (1304-1374) in the earliest decades of the Renaissance.“Remember,” structurally and thematically, is a consummate Petrarchan sonnet. Structurally, the poet follows the conventional formal expectations—14 lines of iambic pentameter following the rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA CDD CDC. Thematically, the poem appears to break radically from its own defined literary context but ultimately returns to that template.

For Petrarch, the sonnet, which is Italian for “little song,” was the perfect vehicle for exploring love and the dynamics of affection and yearning. Indeed, across more than 20 years, Petrarch would pen more than 350 sonnets, each a love poem for a woman known to contemporary readers only as Laura. However, given that Petrarch himself had studied for the priesthood, his love sonnets are infused with the aura and elevation of Christian vision, which Rosetti’s sonnet dismisses. The physical attraction between the lovers is palpable and manifested in a variety of cozy intimate gestures, from long conversations to holding hands.