“Echo” by Christina Georgina Rossetti is a beautifully written love poem.This poem describes the everlasting pain and sadness of a lover. The poetess has beautifully portrayed a lover’s yearning for anything from his or her dead lover. No one can understand the pain of someone who has lost his/her lover. It’s a deep emotional pain which lives through the life.
The poetess requests her dead lover to come back like an echo. When we shout at hills our voice rises as an echo in our ears. Similarly the poetess wants to experience a visual echo.She conveys her wish to see herself in the eyes of his beloved just as we see our own image on a steam during sunlight.
The door in the poem represents the door in the paradise, saying that ‘in Paradise’, all eyes are fixed on the ‘slow door’ opening and letting in souls, which hints at the potential reunion of lovers. This door is the entrance to heaven and the souls living in heaven are free from pain, so there is no longing in the eyes of the soul living in heaven. They are happy and content.That is why she describes the eyes of people are entering heaven through slow door as ‘thirsting’. Thirst here does not mean thirst for water. It is not the physical thirst that makes a person long desperately for some refreshment. It means emotional thirst. The eyes are thirsty to view the image of its lover. Thus here thirst refers to the thirsty eyes.
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Thirsting eyes means the hope of a person to ultimately find his/her lost love in heaven. Those who have thirsting eyes are portrayed as restless, their eyes keep constantly watching for the opening of the door. Her lover is gone forever, she misses him and wants him to come in her dreams and experience the physical as well as the spiritual union once they had.
Throughout the poem from the beginning to the end there is a feeling of longings and desires, poetess badly missed her dead lover and wants to see him once more. According to the poetess, she is the one who is experiencing the feeling of loneliness unlike her lost lover. As her lover is living in a place called heaven which is free from all the pains and sorrows.
She wishes her lover to come back with ‘eyes as bright’. The phase ‘Eyes as bright’ suggests youthfulness and good, accurate vision.She desires to catch a glimpse of her own image, as a kind of visual echo, in the eyes of the beloved
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Thus we see this is a beautiful hauntingly sad poem. The poetess wants her Lover to return in her dreams as a visual echo and see herself in the eyes of her beloved and experiences their spiritual and physical union.