I Remember, I Remember — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
I Remember, I Remember
The poems
What you need to know
I Remember, I Remember by Thomas Hood (1826): a man remembers the house, flowers and trees of his childhood and feels how far he has fallen from the happiness of boyhood.
Hood's life and ill health, the octaves, refrain and turns from past to present, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I remember, I remember, / The house where I was born', 'The little window where the sun / Came peeping in at morn', 'But now, I often wish the night / Had borne my breath away!', 'The roses, red and white', 'Those flowers made of light!', 'The laburnum on his birthday', 'The tree is living yet!', 'My spirit flew in feathers then, / That is so heavy now', 'The fir trees dark and high', 'To know I'm farther off from heav'n / Than when I was a boy'.
Form: four eight-line stanzas in short, alternating lines with rhymes on the even lines, each opening with the refrain 'I remember, I remember' and full of exclamations.
Structure: each stanza recalls one memory (the sun, the flowers, the swing, the fir trees); three of them turn to the speaker's sadness now, while the second ends on the laburnum still alive, so joy and regret alternate to the bleak last line.
Context: Hood (1799 to 1845), born in London above his father's bookshop, wrote for The London Magazine, where he knew John Clare, and later Punch; never robust, he was an invalid by the age of 41 and died at 45; the poem dates from 1826.
Compares well with Captain Cook (To My Brother) (childhood, a brother and a garden), Sunday Dip (the joys of childhood) and Mild the Mist Upon the Hill (going back to a childhood home).
