“Gone far away” repeats the idea from the first line that the speaker is “gone away.” This repetition emphasizes the physical distance between the speaker and her audience. She is not simply traveling or leaving him, she is going to a place where she will be unattainable.
Much like a traditional sonnet, the turn occurs at the volta in line 9. The first two quatrains build the speaker’s argument that her audience should “remember” her when she has died and is out of their reach. The “yet” that begins this line signals a change in the argument. She complicates this command to “remember” her by distinguishing between remembrance and grief; she does not want her audience to grieve.
Notice that the speaker conjures these specific memories by reminding her audience that they can “no more” talk about the future or hold her hand. In mentioning the loss of these actions, the speaker preserves them in memory. Just as the speaker makes these actions permanent by recognizing their absence, she makes herself permanent by commanding her lover to preserve her memory in his mind.
The speaker uses repetition like this throughout the poem for emphasis and to facilitate memorization. Epic poetry used repetition and rhyme to help orators remember the details of a story. In repeating words, sounds, and images in this poem, the speaker structurally reinforces her command to “remember.”
Rossetti uses iambic pentameter and a Petrarchan rhyme scheme to craft this sonnet. Petrarchan sonnets were traditionally used to express unrequited love for a love object. However, the subject matter of this poem is not unrequited love but rather the memory and love that remains when someone’s partner dies. Rossetti’s use of this form could comment on a different kind of unattainable love: this love cannot be returned because the love object is physically unreachable.
