While doing a close reading on the poem After Death by Christina Rossetti, I have came up with many thoughts in order to attempt to capture the message she is conveying.

Based on the first four lines:

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept

And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may

Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay

Where thro’ the lattice ivy-shadows crept.

Because of the curtains half drawn, there is not that much light being let in. The floor was swept, therefore everything was neat and tidy. However, there were rushes, rosemary and may all over the bed that the person is laying on. This paints a picture in my head of a sad place like a funeral home. This word may stands out to me because it symbolizes death. The word bed also stands out to me because I believe it symbolizes a casket. Based on these three lines, I can imagine a wake going on at a funeral home, where everything is sad but organized waiting for people to arrive.

Then in the next five lines:

He leaned above me, thinking that I slept

And could not hear him; but I heard him say:

“Poor child, poor child”: and as he turned away

Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.

I think that this man is one of the people that are attending this wake at a funeral. I believe here the man comes up to the bed on which the person is laying, dead. Because he has a lot of sympathy for this person, and unable to withhold the cries, he cries. Based on this information, I think that this man is of much importance to this person’s life. However, I find the word slept interesting in this context because this person is not sleeping, but is dead, so using this word was quite confusing.

After in the next three lines:

He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold

That hid my face, or take my hand in his,

Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:

Here, I feel like the man is sad because he is feeling sympathetic and upset because this person is laying there dead, in front of his own eyes. However, he does not show his sympathy in any actions. He does cry, but he does not take the person’s hand or touch the shroud, which is a piece of cloth used to wrap the buried person.

In the last three lines:

He did not love me living; but once dead

He pitied me; and very sweet it is

To know he still is warm tho’ I am cold.

I think that the man does not show sympathy, like hold this person’s hand or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head and therefore does not love this person. Only when this person is dead, he pities this person. At the end, this person is dead, but will die with the thought of knowing the man is sweet and warm. I feel like these three lines convey the ultimate message of the poem, which is that you do not know what you have until it is gone. Sometimes, people take things for granted, but when we do not have that thing anymore, we feel bad and want it back. Applying that here, the man did not love this person when alive but when this person died, he cared and even wept at the end when seeing this person dead. Death is a powerful event that breaks people down, but sometimes are able to bring relationships closer. Like in this case, the man was very sad that this person died, and the person felt closer to the man because he or she knew his real feelings. Also, in these last three lines, I think that the person is getting a sense of closure symbolically. This is because this person is laying on his or her death bed, knowing that this man did not love him or her. However, now that this person is dead, and the man has come to the funeral home, crying in front of the person, this person is able to now know that he feels sorry for this person and he is really is nice and does care for him or her. I put symbolically because we are unable to know if the person really did feel his presence by her spirit or if it is just a symbol to show the difference in people before and after death.